How to Embrace Vulnerability

We talked to Charlie Aufmann, Design Manager at Airbnb Design, about how a proper feedback culture can stimulate purpose-driven and immersive work.

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What have been your experiences with the educational system?

Charlie Aufmann
I thought about this a lot. A lot of people aren’t born with all of the privileges, that I had. I was born into a upper middle class family. My parents supported me to go to college and paid for a pretty significant chunk of my tuition. So these privileges set me up for many many options, that a lot of people
have to work much harder to even effort. You know, looking back at my
experience going from high school to college and set off on a path to be
successful, even if I didn’t know what success was at that time. That felt pretty daunting not knowing what I needed to do to be successful. My heart was pushing me to pursuing art and going to art school but the fear kicked in and I thought: »I’ll never be able to make money doing this. I would never be able to effort to have the family, I was lucky enough grow up in. I’ll never be able to put my kids to college.« That’s what pushed me to find a compromise. The word compromise is terrifying. When you think about the things, you love and you’re passionate about, you should never compromise. I understand
why I made these compromises, but if I could do it all over again, I definitely would have gone to art school and pursued that. I think luckily for me I ended up in a good situation. I’m really happy where I’m at and it was kind of a really weird way of getting here. But I definitely don’t feel like the education system helped me get here. I think what helped me get here, was having good parents, having good friends, having the ability to open my mind to different perspectives and consider different possibilities of where my life and my career could go. And just finding ways to connect the dots and reroute myself
to bring me back to my passions. Initially when I chose schools and going down a career path, I was pushing these things aside and just trying to make money. In high school we had counselors, that helped you pick out your university. These were people, who were deliberately pushing me away
from art school, because it wasn’t a fruitful, moneymaking path to go down.
I was having conversations with my dad, who is an attorney, and we have a great relationship. We were weighing the pros and cons to which school
I was going to go to and tried to set my life up. He was very much a support of me going to art school. He was like »This is what you’re good at, this
is what you love. We’ll find a way to make it work. Just work hard.« And I was like: »Yeah, but maybe I go to law school and be a lawyer like you!« And he actually pushed me away from that. He spend his entire life working his ass off, made everything from nothing and hated his job, but was able to provide opportunities, he was trying to give me to go pursue, what I wanted to do instead of what I felt, I had to do. And I didn’t listen to him. And that was a huge regret for me. But bringing it back to education: I don’t feel like education did what my father was able to do for me, which was to urge me to follow my passions. And especially in the world, we live in today, with the internet and all these ways of meeting different people and finding intersections of passions, there’s millions of ways now to create careers out of what you love. I think it’s way easier today, then it has been ever before to create new strings of income and find new definitions of making money and what a successful career is. And Airbnb is a really good example as well. So yeah, I had a weird route to where I’m at today but I feel like I’m confidently in a place right now, where I’m loving what I do every single day, exercising my brain creatively and doing the tangible things of design in many different ways. I’m loving to apply the different design thinking processes and applying them in different ways in my life.

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So, you are self-taught designer?

Charlie Aufmann
Yeah.

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Are there a lot of people at Airbnb, which don’t have an actual
graduation or something? You said, today there are uncommon ways to get where you want to be.

Charlie Aufmann
Yes, it was really surprising, honestly. I graduated from university, worked
for a couple of tech startups in Chicago, tried my shot and started my
own thing, which failed but taught me a million things, which was a ton of
fun. Then I got the opportunity to come out here to Airbnb. And I like you guys imagined everybody here comes from traditional, classical design schools, very well-educated and I was super surprised to find out, it was the exact opposite. When I joined, I was the 12th designer and we have like 120 now – three years later. Sure we have folks, that come from that clinical, more traditional approach. But one of the first designers I met here – who is a deep friend and one of my mentors here – immigrated from Brazil, never graduated high school, taught himself English while living in a hostel in San Francisco for the first one and a half years. He taught himself design and is one of the best, most well-respected designers we have in this office. I think, that’s a huge testament to what Airbnb looks for. I myself – who is on the other side of the interviewing table now – interviewing candidates on a weekly basis, must say, it’s nowhere near to what I have expected the interview process to be, when I was on the other side of the table. What we look for now, is much more of a strong point of view and a different perspective, that we don’t have on our design team yet. Versus trying to check a bunch of boxes, that say this person has this degree, went to this school and worked at this company for this long. It’s like resumes are pretty much thrown out the window. And if you get a chance to come in and meet us face-to-face and talk through your work, we’re more interested in your unique point of view around your work and what shaped and drove that work, rather than how you got to where you are.

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This is a good example of what we witness in general, that companies are taking a more important role in defining education and shaping what we learn and how we see the world. How do you think institutions like schools or universities can keep up with the flexibility and innovation of new economy companies?

Charlie Aufmann
Education is an industry, that I haven’t worked in yet, but I would love to
get the opportunity in my career to use my thoughts- and design-process to attack that problem. Because I do think it’s a huge opportunity in the world right now. The education system still feels so antiquated in relation to
where the world is going. It hasn’t really matched up to where the world is going right now. And I was just back, visiting my old university and walked through the halls, went to the classrooms, visited the library and it feels so old. It feels like walking through a completely different world– decades prior. So it’s definitely a challenge, that I’m interested working on at some point. I think, schools just need to start embracing change, you know? The thing, that university ultimately taught me, wasn’t the principles, the rules or the definitions. What I remember is how to learn and how to have an open mind and how to take values from experiences and connect that with value from other experiences. And that’s something, nobody designed a curriculum around. How would you design a curriculum around »How to learn?« versus »What to learn ?«I don’t really have a convincing answer to that question, but I definitely think there’s an opportunity – even if I don’t really know what that looks like.

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That’s what we are trying to research – at least part of. What could that look like? How can we study in the future and how can universities still be attractive to young creative people? I mean, that young people are running off to companies to learn there, that’s nothing that is self-evident. I guess, that’s part of the process, that schools and universities are way back in time and often can’t keep up with whats going on in the world right now.

Charlie Aufmann
Schools are still so focused on a curriculum based on subject matter. For more traditional degrees like pharmacy or medicine or even traditional engineering that’s probably the right way. But if you’re studying liberal arts, politics, design or these types of things, the principles – they teach you – are antiquated. And by the time you graduate they’re not really useful anymore. You’re not going to apply those to what you’re doing. So I feel like, in those types of roles, in those types of career paths, it’s just much more important to learn how to learn, to learn how to collaborate, to learn how to embrace vulnerability. A lot of the questions you’re referring to, are around how to encourage people to share work and collaborate and not want to hold their cards tight to their chest –but instead open their hands and see how they can get value from collaborating with other people. In my mind it’s firing of, like what would a physical space look like in order to do that. Then I’m looking at these walls here at Airbnb and there are a lot of examples of how we’ve designed our office here to be that way. I guess my short answer is: It’s more important to learn how to perform, rather than learning the subject matter. Learning the importance of collaboration, learning what value you get from doing that, learning more processes.

Schools are still so focused on a curriculum based on subject matter. For more traditional degrees like pharmacy or medicine or even traditional engineering that’s probably the right way. But if you’re studying liberal arts,
politics, design or these types of things, the principles – they teach you – are antiquated. And by the time you graduate they’re not really useful anymore. You’re not going to apply those to what you’re doing. So I feel like, in those types of roles, in those types of career paths, it’s just much more important to learn how to learn, to learn how to collaborate, to learn how to embrace vulnerability.

— Charlie Aufmann

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And also learning through experience, right? That’s what you do
at Airbnb and that’s why we relate Airbnb to education. We followed that idea we had, that you as a company also offer education, when you offer all those experiences like cooking with your hosts and connect with their culture through that experience. This new way of traveling to different places is a learning process as well. It’s a cultural exchange and it changes the peoples view on the world. So, how do you see that? Do you think, your platform also has an educational purpose?

Charlie Aufmann
Hell yeah, man. Absolutely! This is the project I’ve been working on for a
year and a half now. When I joined Airbnb, it was just about ›homes‹.
I worked on a bunch of different things. I launched our first business travel
product. I worked on trust in the community, which was fascinating. How
can you use design to encourage trust in an online community? And I don’t know how the hell I got an opportunity to do that, because I have no background in behavioral economics, in psychology or community behavior.
But it was such an amazing learning experience. The opportunity I landed in a year and a half ago, which I don’t see myself coming off any time soon, because I’m so passionate about it, is this experience economy. Long story short, Airbnb is trying to become an end-to-end trip platform and an end-to-end trip provider. So rather than just providing in which home you’re staying in, it’s more about how you spend your time in the places your visiting and how we as a product, as a platform and as an online community can inspire these intersections of differences and embrace those differences and get people to try new things. And man, I can’t define education any better than that, right? I just mentioned being back in my old university, walking through
the library, it’s dead silent, people at tables with headphones on, buried
in books. And they are sitting right next to another person, but not interacting at all. It’s like everybody is in their own little world. And what this product provides is a way to immerse. And I think immersion is the next level of education. How can you immerse yourself in that subject matter – not study
it in a book but be in it, feel it, touch it, speak with it, engage with it and play with it. That’s what this product allows you to do. And what’s even more
special about it is, it allows you to do it in a completely different place,
where the norms are totally different from where you’re coming from. You might not even speak the language.Luckily that’s a project, where I get
to work with our CEO, Brian Chesky, directly on it and he uses the word education a lot. The basic vision of this product is to create transformation
in trips through a shifted perspective. And sometimes you can get that by staying in someone else’s home. And if it’s a person, who is hospitable
and invites you to dinner or out with their friends, then that kind of natural
connection with people definitely is the ingredients to make that happen. But skill-sharing is another one. Brian always mentions education when it comes to these skill-sharing experiences, learning how to cook, learning how to surf, learning how to do these other things.

Airbnb is trying to become an end-to-end trip platform and an end-to-end trip provider. So rather than just providing in which home you’re staying in, it’s more about how you spend your time in the places your visiting and how we as a product, as a platform and as an online community can inspire these intersections of differences and embrace those differences and get people to try new things. And man, I can’t define education any better than that, right? I just mentioned being back in my old university, walking through the library, it’s dead silent, people at tables with headphones on, buried in books. And they are sitting right next to another person, but not interacting at all. It’s like everybody is in their own little world. And what this product provides is a way to immerse. And I think immersion is the next level of education. How can you immerse yourself in that subject matter – not study
it in a book but be in it, feel it, touch it, speak with it, engage with it and play with it.

— Charlie Aufmann

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We totally agree, that the meaningful connections to people, fruitful conversations and a sustainable educational experience happens in the physical world. But from your perspective, what is the most important thing, when it comes to exchanging knowledge or valuable experiences online? How can you motivate people to contribute?

Charlie Aufmann
It’s tough, because our online community is a little different than other online communities. I want to preface by saying these are just personal observations. Nothing is absolute. I don’t believe in absolutes. These are just my opinions. I don’t have experienced working at reddit or Facebook or Twitter, which are online communities, that are drastically different from ours. Thinking back to my interview, when I came here three years ago and sat down with our head of design, he said something, that really caught my attention, which I think was one of the key ingredients to inspire me to work here: »The device, that we’re designing for and the a lot of the product, that we’re designing, is digital, but it’s meant to get people off of their screen and connect to real people.« So it’s tough to answer your question, because that’s the frame of mind, we’re always in, when designing this stuff. How can we get people to go to that restaurant? How can we get people to go to that park and meet a local? Or to stay in a home, that’s with a host versus the entire home to themselves? So we don’t encourage a lot of online person-to-person or user-to-user connection. It’s more of »What can we do to get this person off the phone and in the real world?«

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Airbnb developed the open source tool Another Lens to help designers create a more empathic and holistic approach to design, by minimizing the impact of bias on the design process. In the old economy concepts and insides like this would have been kept a secret to get advantage over their competitors. What‘s your benefit of sharing all those high value informations with the world?

Charlie Aufmann
Airbnb might have done this five, six, seven years ago. One thing that’s really important to us, that we work on, is not just the brand of Airbnb but the brands of our teams inside Airbnb. So, Airbnb Engineering has their own brand, Airbnb Design has their own brand. I think, publishing something like
this, is an effort to be more respected in the product-, and design-, and tech-community, within our design team. It perfectly matches up with some
of the core principles and values, that we try to express at Airbnb on a daily basis around acceptance, belonging, openness and sharing. It’s immensely valuable for us as a brand. When I was trying my hand at starting my own business, I was always worried about holding my ideas close to my chest. I
didn’t want to share these ideas with other people, which is also related to
the whole feedback thing. What I learned is, that there’s not really a lot
of value in an idea. The value is in the execution. At Airbnb, we’re totally okay with sharing our work and sharing our thinking and sharing our frameworks. Because the secret sauce for us is the physical, like when you come to this office and you see how we work and interact with each other and the respect, we have for one another and how all of that yields to the execution and what you see in the product. That’s our differentiator not the idea. There are plenty other people competing with Airbnb right now, so I think sharing something like this is a testament to following our values, to increase brand respect. And I think, we it’s not really a risk for us to share something like this.

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And that’s exactly, what we’re trying to establish with our platform here. We want to encourage people to open up their process, you know? Students, should not only feel comfortable in showing the finished showcases and portfolios, but also showing how they got there – at best during the process. We think that’s the most important thing for others to learn from. Because if you just see shiny products, there wouldn’t be any added value. You can check that on the internet all day long, but to see how people get there and how they improve themselves, that’s the most important thing for a community.

Charlie Aufmann
I agree 1000% with that. I would love to see even art galleries and exhibits,
that focus more on highlighting the process and how artists got to their
final results. Process always kind of scared me because it’s one of those words, that made me think: »Oh shit, that is probably something I would have learned, if I went to art school or design school.« No it’s not. Because process changes, it evolves and adopts the changes in the environment. It changes per company. It changes per project. And even if you throw in a new individual to your team, the process is going to change. So, just embracing this process, harnessing it and not being afraid of to change, adapt and evolve, that’s the key. God, the world we live in is changing so fast. Not sharing these
ideas and these frameworks, I think its criminal.

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Airbnb lately founded Samara, an internal design studio that tackles questions and developing new ideas around topics like sharing, service design and digitalisation – all directly or indirectly linked to Airbnb. What‘s the value and the advantage of a small and agile institution compared to a big company?

Charlie Aufmann
When I first got into product design and working in tech and entrepreneurship, everything I was doing was on super small teams. And it was exhilarating, it was open, it was fast. There is so much collaboration at the core, soul and heartbeat of everything, that’s going on. And when I came to Airbnb, that was actually one of the biggest things, that worried me. Not the other worry, the impostor syndrome, that I wasn’t good enough to be here, which was a huge worry too. And I learned, that a lot of folks, who worked here, went through something similar, when they started working here. But I worried about how I would make it, or how I would get by, or how I would succeed or not succeed in a big company environment. And the biggest observations, I’ve had, are: It’s a big company, there are a lot of people but there is almost something like smaller companies inside Airbnb, which are designed around something like a business initiative or a goal or an outcome. We call it ›outcomes‹. So one of those outcomes could be: Trying to inspire more trust, to get more of our listings to be instant book versus requested book. We believe in belonging and a lot of people are getting rejected from a place you want to stay in for vacation – that’s a horrible experience. And also noticing, there’s a lot of racial bias in a lot of these approval processes. Then we design a team with multiple disciplines around that outcome and they’ll all sit together. So you have engineers with an engineering manager, you have designers with a design manager, you have a product manager, content strategists, a researcher and data scientists. All these different disciplines are united around an outcome and sit together in the same place in the office maybe near a related team, what could encourage more collaboration between them. I think, that when it comes to size and when you’re in the early stages of a project, still defining the problem or understand the space you’re working in or you’re just trying to find the magic behind what you’re trying to achieve, a smaller team can be more conducive to do that, because your
tighter together. I’ve seen our experience team grow tenfold in the past
six months and it just naturally pulls apart. There’s more space in between the hearts and the brains behind of what you’re trying to achieve. Sure, there are things that combat that. There is better process, that you can explore. There is always better process, but it’s challenging. It’s way harder, when there’s physical space in between people. Now we have teams in Tokyo, in Sydney, all over the world in all these different cities. Trying to collaborate and share work is becoming harder.

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And as well, this closeness and clarity of small groups empowers honest feedback. You can really be honest on other peoples ideas in a familiar circle and be more productive together. It’s also important for us to empower that.

Charlie Aufmann
Yes, honesty is very important. I’m mentoring a junior designer, right now. We usually don’t hire junior designers here, which I don’t understand. But I had
this guy for a six months associateship, that at the end of the six months could eventually transition to full-time. And we just transitioned him to full-time, because he has just been killing it. And the biggest thing, that I’ve noticed in him, is that he as a junior designer‚ has so much raw talent and knowledge
and ability to execute. He’s such a good executer, but what he lacks in –
that I’m able to mentor and provide guidance on – is the day-to-day internal process around how to navigate in a big company. How to put a story together around your work? Not just share your work with other people, but how you can actually bring people into your process and bring people along for your ride. This has to be the number one thing, that I’ve learned especially in working here. And I got this feedback from a manager two years ago and I’ll never forget it: »You need to be better at bringing people along for the ride. You’re good at putting your headphones on, cranking out work and then sharing, what you’ve done. There is all this wealth of information, there is all this wealth in perspectives from these different disciplines. And yes, you’re good at collaborating with designers, but that’s not the only people, you should bring along your process.« That was the biggest game changer in my career. Now my day-to-day is collaborating with operations-people, with business- and finance-people. Even collaborating with lawyers is something I do on a weekly basis here. So there are not just designers sitting next to me,
it’s all these other people, who have investment and passion in the project through different lenses. That is what’s really going to make the work special. It’s gonna take more time, it’s gonna take more effort, but it’s worth it in the end. That’s something you gotta work on, getting people to have a buy-in their own. When I was in school, especially right out of school, I thought »I don’t need help on anything. I can do everything by myself and I’ll share it, when it’s done.« But that’s just such a naiv thing to do. It really won’t help your career.

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When it comes to applications and online services it seems there are more complicated and unintuitive products than simple and intuitive ones. How do you get to the core of what really matters for the product you’re working on?

Charlie Aufmann
If I had to define that in one word it would be: purpose. And purpose was the thing, that ultimately caused me to get out of the agency world and work on a product, because the purpose was so much richer. Instead of designing campaigns, I was designing a tool to help radiologist to do their job better and diagnose more properly. And I followed purpose, not just where my career was going, but also in the execution of my day-to-day tasks. And purpose for Airbnb comes down to our mission and our values. It’s like this guiding light, that helps our CEO to make big decisions but helps everyone else make day-to-day decisions as well. How are we creating a world, that’s more belonging and more accepting? Purpose and point of view are really important principles for me. Why are you spending time in a certain place? What is
driving you? What do you care about ultimately and how is the time and energy you’re investing in this, making a difference in something that you care about? Once you’ve found that in your inner position – to create based on purpose – you have to have a unique point of view in order to express that in a unique way. And I think, this also goes back to how we were talking about
recruiting before. Sometimes, when you come from a more traditional
educational background, you get bogged down with the principles you’ve learned and the basic definition of what design is. You condition yourself to refer to what the book says. I feel like designers need to think more with their hearts, then with their minds sometimes and it should be a harmony between those two things. But what your heart guides, is that unique point of view. And it’s about confidence and honesty and trust. It’s a muscle, that needs to be trained. When you’re early on in your career, you often let fear overtake your points of view. You say what’s safer to justify your work, based on let’s say design principles versus telling the story, what your heart led you to do and why you did that. And a lot of that is confidence.

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It makes you vulnerable if you tell that story from the heart, because it’s really what you feel inside. If somebody attacks that, it will attack your feelings, because it attacks you as a person. That might be the most difficult part for our platform to encourage people to share their process. A lot of students are really young and insecure, because they probably haven’t worked in the industry. They never got bad feedback from an art director for example, which is totally normal, nothing personal and simply part of the job. So they might not know, how to handle feedback.

Charlie Aufmann
God, that’s really tough. It’s hard to say, but I don’t know, if this is something, that I would have been able to learn without having the experiences that
I had. Is this something you can teach – in a book, in a seminar, in a lecture
or in a conversation? It’s a muscle you have to develop. Confidence can’t be taught. Insecurity can’t be pushed away by a lecture. But it’s really important to talk about it. It’s really important that your space and your platform encourage this relationship to feedback. How would you design a space around encouraging vulnerability? That’s a fucking amazing design challenge, right? Maybe it’s more about, how you encourage human behavior versus the space. But it’s probably pairing between those two things. I still find myself a victim to those insecurities. If I go into a design review with Brian and our Head of Product and these higher-ups, I often think it might be easier to justify my work in a more rational way. But being a designer is such an amazing opportunity to infuse expression and personality and point of view into your work. I don’t know, but I feel like, the more you push those things away, the more your work becomes muddy, basic and templaded.

Is this something you can teach — in a book, in a seminar, in a lecture or in a conversation? It’s a muscle you have to develop. Confidence can’t be taught. Insecurity can’t be pushed away by a lecture. But it’s really important to talk about it. It’s really important that your space and your
platform encourage this relationship to feedback. How would you design a space around encouraging vulnerability? That’s a fucking amazing design challenge, right? Maybe it’s more about, how you encourage human behavior versus the space. But it’s probably pairing between those two things. I still find myself a victim to those insecurities. If I go into a design review with Brian and our Head of Product and these higher-ups, I often think it might be easier to justify my work in a more rational way. But being a designer is such an amazing opportunity to infuse expression and personality and point of view into your work.

— Charlie Aufmann

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You talked about, that you now have offices all over the world and that it makes it more complicated to work together. That’s maybe not only because of the physical distances between the offices, but also because you have different cultural backgrounds. That’s one thing. But you have a digital product that has to deal with these cultural differences as well. So, to make a product work worldwide, you have to break the interactions down to the most intuitive needs every human has, right? What do you think is important to bring together people from different cultures and make them open up to each other?

Charlie Aufmann
Diversity is paramount to everything, we’re doing here. The product,
we’re designing, is a global product, right? So you have to incorporate
and understand different perspectives and different backgrounds, when
designing a product, that different people are gonna be using. And throwing out bias is a huge part of that. But for us it all starts with recruiting. I have never ever seen a recruiting process better designed that the one we have here. We have this part of our interview process called core-values-interviewing. Our company has this set of core values, that are near and dear and important to everything, that we’re doing here. It’s really like the meat and bones behind the purpose of what we’re trying to execute. And we have constructed a team, that has been hand-picked by our founders, who
represent those core values to execute these core-values-interviews with every single person, who’s interviewing here no matter what their role is. They’re trained to do these interviews and go through bias-training on a bimonthly basis. Essentially what they do, is an hour-long interview not about the candidates discipline, not about their work, not about their career, but about their personality and about the things in their heart, that drive them to do, what they do. Without that recruiting process, we wouldn’t have the culture, that we have today. And one of the huge things we have in that culture here is vulnerability, openness, honesty and embracing change and diversity. I try to
get out of the office as much as I can. I visited our Barcelona, our Tokyo
and our Sydney office. We call these trips ›roadshows‹. You can make a
trip like that once a quarter, because the destinations represent the key markets of the projects that I’m working on. So I can meet the operationsteam and I tell them what we’re working on and we figure out how they can get involved. For example, we have this application, that you fill out to become an experience host on Airbnb and I was showing this to a woman in the Tokio office. One of the questions we ask in this application wasn’t really cultural offensive, but would have been totally taken the wrong way in Japanese culture. So we learned, that we probable need to alter these questions depending on the market. That’s a very very small example. […] It’s really hard to explain how it manifests into the product, but trusting and believing in the process and believing that diversity, change and pairing of different minds is going to create something magical and beautiful, that’s something everyone in this office – I can confidently say – embraces, which is really really special.

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Airbnb attracts curious people. People who want to discover the world and people who aren’t afraid of meeting strangers. Is it possible to stimulate this curiosity by design? In which ways does the Airbnb platform encourage intrinsic curiosity?

Charlie Aufmann
Curiosity is definitely an important pillar here. It’s such a good question. Joe Gebbia, our Co-Founder, who’s heading up the Samara team always says this line: »People are mostly good.« Everybody has good and bad in them. And choosing to believe that most people are made out of mostly good things is not a very popular thought right now – in terms of current political events. We have world leaders, unfortunately, who encourage us to do the opposite of that and to not trust our neighbors, to ban muslims from our country. It’s sick and sad. It’s just a choice, that each person has to make deep down. Do you wanna live in a world, where your decisions are guided by fear? Or do you wanna live in a world, where your decisions are guided by love and curiosity and hope and positivity? At least, coming to Airbnb and trying our product is enough of a choice to say: »Hugh. I gonna at least look into this.« You may have even heard a horror story about somebody getting valuable things stolen from their apartment or African Americans being discriminated on our platform. These are horrible things, that we’re trying to combat against. But curiosity and trust…I think trust has to be the biggest catalyst here. Good design can lead to trust. I think about the project I’m working on – experiences – which is still pretty much a managed marketplace. Even in the choices what types of things we wanna encourage and allow – from an experience and skill-sharing standpoint – it would be so much easier for our business to say: »Doing a walk across the Golden Gate Bridge sells like crazy.
We should onboard a bunch of these ›Golden-Gate-experiences‹!« But NO. We want to encourage weird shit and different shit and have a wide spectrum of different things, that you can experience on our platform. One of the engineers on our team hosts ›A history of pinball through the mission‹, which is a neighborhood in San Francisco. It’s a super weird experience but it’s amazing. It’s honest and real and an expression of himself. We got so many hosts, who filter what they love and what their passion is down to what they
think people are going to purchase. Sure, you might need to make a few trade offs, but ultimately it’s about selling ›you‹. You are an interesting person. You have the unique perspective. You have a passion. You have credibility in something interesting. And you need to be confident in sharing that, because people want to book you. They want to spend time with you. So, even the decision of what we allow on to our experiences marketplace is a reflection of that curiosity, I think.

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What was the most inspiring creative culture you’ve been part of so far?

Charlie Aufmann
It’s Airbnb. It’s such an easy answer but it’s a difference like night and day
from any other place, that I’ve ever worked in. It’s sad to think about, but I
don’t know, if I’ll ever work in another place like this. I hope to someday
take on the challenge to recreate some of these things through my own endeavor. But for right now, I’m so happy and grateful to be here. There are
so many people in the world, who are struggling to survive and they’re
working their ass of to put food on the table. They don’t have time to
think about their feelings, you know? It’s a privilege to reflect and think
about your feelings. And especially to put these feelings and expressions
into your work. And I might not have had that privilege, if I decided to
go to law school.

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So you said, you would try to copy some of the things, you learned from
the culture at Airbnb, when you start your own business. What would
these things be? What would you consider the most important aspects of this creative culture?

Charlie Aufmann
It’s all about, who you bring in and how you encourage them to behave. We
are an accepting company and we accept all types of people to come in here, but there has to be a unification around values, right? And the values are the glue and the joints and the nuts and the links, that really bring all of us together. You might come from a completely different part of the world, with a completely different believe set and a completely different religion, but I might sit right next to you and work with you on something and we are united by that purpose and we are united by these values that bind us together. So each of our individuality will express itself in its own way and pair together to make something beautiful. But you have to have that joint purpose. So I would just ask yourselves: »What are these underlying forces and principles for the environment you wanna create? And how can you find the right people to unite around those principles? What are the behaviors you want to inspire?« I would always start on the inside: What’s the soul? What’s the heartbeat. What are those three to five things, that are just nonnegotiable, that you would never give up in your process? And then let it bleed from the inside out. How is that gonna affect your execution? All the decisions should come from that core. So, really put a lot of time and consideration in to what that core is.

•
Thank you so much for the conversation and for your time.

In Conversation with Charlie Aufmann, Experience Design Lead
Airbnb, San Francisco

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