Vlad Loktev: belief

Transcript context

…So first, I guess, let me zoom out from Airbnb for a second and then we'll go into the concrete details of what Brian said. I don't think you should copy another company's ways of working. The reality is it is how a company operates is so unique to the founders, to the leadership team, to all the employees, and the domain potentially, moment in time. Because how companies operate also evolve sometimes over time and just certain different ways of operating might be needed. So, I wouldn't just copy someone else's way of operating. It just copies someone else's way of operating. Even at Airbnb, it was just very interesting. For us, it took us a long time to figure out how to operate, right? Actually, we did it for a long time, explain and give clarity to people of how we should even operate in the first place. Because, so we hire people from Facebook and Amazon and Google and Netflix and every Apple, every company, right? And every person would come in with their own preconceived notions of how they want it to work. And oftentimes those opinions differed. And so because we never actually stated the Airbnb way for a very long time, sometimes it would be chaotic, right? People just wouldn't know how to operate and then you go from team to team, teams would just operate very, very differently. And that was a problem. So I think here the lesson for me was not necessarily there is one way to... Like every company should operate this way. And it's much more about picking an explicit way to operate and then voicing it to every single person so that everyone has clarity on how to do their job. I think the worst thing is people just don't have clarity on how to do things day to day. They don't know how to drive impact and they're just like, what am I doing with my life? So that was kind of one lesson. Now specifically going double clicking into Airbnb and where we moved. So I think one of the things that Brian mentioned was being top down, right? I actually think top down is this construct that has negative connotations associated with it quite a bit. And it's often, at least in the context of Airbnb, I think misunderstood. What people think top down... And I've had many by the way, many of these conversations with folks, right? So most people think, oh, there's a leader here in an ivory tower sitting somewhere. It's a voice from the team making a whole bunch of [inaudible 01:17:07], right? And everyone else is like powerless and can't do anything. That's not actually a reality of top down. Now, in that room where we made many of the hard decisions with Brian, the reality was he asked a shit ton of questions, right? Again, he didn't advocate in the beginning. He would come in with tons and tons of questions and he would listen. And of course sometimes, he would disregard certain things that he heard because he had very strong conviction, a different direction. But he listened and oftentimes he would also change his mind, right? of course sometimes, he would disregard certain things that he heard because he had very strong conviction, a different direction. But he listened and oftentimes he would also change his mind, right? And so as a leader at Airbnb for so long, I never felt like I wasn't listened to or like he was just making these random decisions. I always had an ability to influence and an ability to voice where I felt like the company should go. So yes, he made a lot of decisions, but he made sure he was informed in those decisions and then many of us were Contributing to all the information he needed to make the decision, which is then also why he wanted every leader to be in the details. Why did he stress that for himself and every single leader on the team? It's because when you get into that room, right? And you start discussing many different directions you can go, if the leaders in that room can't tell you what's actually happening with the business, then why they're there in the first place, right? You can't then make a good decision with that group of people. So then suddenly your team of 10, you have to blow up to a team of 30. And if those people are not in the details, then you got to like what? Bring in 50 people? And so at some point you need to make sure that leadership is actually in the details, understand what's happening, and can help bring to light information that's going to help somebody make the right decision, right? So that's why top-down and being in the details to me, they were actually very connected and they made a whole lot of sense. Now, the one thing I'll say is at some point when you are working on many things, it is challenging to be in all the detail, right? And if you mandate that product cannot ship without certain people being in every single detail, sometimes you could slow it down, right? And that could be a con of that way of working. I would argue for us at Airbnb, the quality of what we were releasing kind of suffered because we were just push, push, push, ship, ship, ship, and people were shipping across the board. And I did feel as a leader, like I wasn't proud of some of the things we were shipping. And so I appreciated the intentional slowdown at the expense of our goals to get to a higher quality bar and then amp up velocity again. After everyone had a better understanding of what quality actually was. So we kind of had to slow down for a bit to then speed up later. And I think a lot of it is Brian always wanted to make sure that every leader would be able to make decisions and have really good judgment, and he wanted to teach what that meant. And I actually really appreciated that over the years. Now, if you were to go back to semantics and say, Hey, were we top down, bottom up? Those are just semantics, I would say we were actually... If you really think about it, we were neither. Because bottom up you could always through certain channels, voice information. Again, if you didn't self-center and you were not afraid to poke the bear, you had an ability to voice information. So from that sense, lots of information that came bottom up. els, voice information. Again, if you didn't self-center and you were not afraid to poke the bear, you had an ability to voice information. So from that sense, lots of information that came bottom up. But then at the same time, there was also a lot of conviction and intuition and context that came top down. And because for a lot of these decisions, there was so much conversation. The reality is I think the way we operate was actually somewhere more towards the middle on a day-to-day basis. Which is why for me, I thought it was great.…

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