Joe Gebbia recounts Airbnb's 2006 inception, where renting airbeds saved his apartment and evolved into a global platform connecting billions. He details the "trough of sorrow," failed cereal ventures, and eventual Visa funding before joining the Trump administration as Chief Design Officer to digitize federal retirement and launch "America by Design." Despite facing hate mail and social distancing, Gebbia founded the Eames Institute, paid off his parents' mortgage, and purchased a Back to the Future hoverboard. Leaving Airbnb in 2022, he now recruits designers for DC while reflecting on how personal costs fade, proving that design can transform both hospitality and government efficiency. [Automatically generated summary]
So how did you take Airbnb from an idea in your mind to bring it into the world?
Well, that required the help of two incredible co-founders.
Brian has this incredible ability to motivate people and get them excited and acting on ideas.
There was always this kind of spirit between him and I that if we were in the same room, I always thought we could think of a big idea together.
And that left a deep impression on me.
Both of us at this point were unemployed, aspiring founders for something.
We didn't know what it was going to be.
I was looking at a website for a design conference that we were going to go attend.
It said in big red letters, it tells sold out.
I used to host people on this airbed in college.
I pull it out.
I blew it up.
You know, those arrow beds.
I put it on the floor.
Realized, wait, we've got room for like one or two more arrow beds.
And so I emailed Brian and said, What do you think about renting out airbeds to other designers like us coming to the conference?
That night I was laying in bed and I was like, What are we going to call this?
They're sleeping on airbeds.
Maybe it's an airbed at breakfast.
Hi. Welcome to the Katie Miller Podcast.
Today I'm joined by Airbnb co-founder, Joe Gabia.
Joe, welcome to the pod.
Thanks, Katie.
It's great to be here.
So can you give us 30 seconds quickly about yourself and who you are and what are you doing in Washington, D.C.?
How did I get here?
Renting Airbeds to Designers00:16:01
I am a designer, entrepreneur, and I was always doing art as a kid.
It brought me to art school in college.
I studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, where I switched from fine arts to design and fell in love with this idea that you could use creativity to solve problems and make the world a better place.
And I was largely inspired by Charles and Ray Eames, who were two of the most prolific designers of the mid-20th century.
And I really saw for the first time, like, wow, you can actually use design to reach people at scale, like through industrial designs, this idea of designing for manufacturability, so that you can make the objects in our lives at scale to reach a lot of people.
I also learned along the way industrial design.
The definition was scribbled on a whiteboard in our design studio on campus, and it said, Industrial design is anything made by man that's not art or architecture.
So literally the world around us, the things we interact with, the things we consume, the things we wear, on our feet, on our eyes, the phones in our pockets, the devices, all of that has been designed by somebody and I fell in love with this idea.
So when you graduated art school, you moved to California?
Yeah, so when I was in high school, it was during the first dot-com.
And I started to learn HTML.
And I started to publish websites and was enthralled by this idea that, you know, in my little tiny town of Lawrenceville, Georgia, I could, at my dad's computer, code a website, hit publish, and suddenly anybody with internet access could see it.
So you taught yourself to code?
Yes.
Like anybody in the world could see something that I just created and designed.
This was the first website you built.
Oh, goodness.
It's in hello world, like everybody else.
I make websites for friends.
And like people would start to come to me as a teenager and say, hey, I need a website on this internet thing.
Can you please help me out?
Did you monetize it?
I think I was just excited to make things.
So probably not.
I did monetize a lot of other things, though.
That wasn't the original side hustle.
Plenty of other side hustles as a kid.
So it was exciting.
And I remember thinking during that time, this is like late 90s.
Every day after school, I'd come home to my new Mac computer that my parents had got me.
It was a G4.
it was like the best Mac at the time.
And I'd get on to read about all the companies that had started or launched in Silicon Valley that day.
It was literally a daily event.
There was some new business, some new company that was getting off the ground.
And it was just so exciting.
I remember thinking, one day, like, I want to go there.
Like, I want to be in the Silicon Valley place.
I had no idea where it was on a map.
I couldn't even tell you where it was.
I knew it was in California somewhere.
But there was just such excitement.
And, you know, I kind of knew as a young person, my parents worked for themselves.
I kind of thought, one day, I want to work for myself as well.
And all roads for entrepreneurship and the internet seemed to lead to Silicon Valley.
So when I graduated, I packed my life into my Jeep Cherokee, drove cross-country, had this amazing road trip, and arrived in San Francisco.
And so at what point did you meet your co-founders and decide to have a crazy idea to build a company that I think a lot of people at the time thought would not be successful and certainly not succeed?
I met my co-founder, my first co-founder, Brian, at Rhode Island School of Design.
He was also studying industrial design.
And when we were on campus, it turns out that him and I were, we earned these nicknames of like, you know, being the two entrepreneurs on campus.
So how did you take Airbnb from an idea in your mind to bring it into the world?
Well, that required the help of two incredible co-founders.
And Brian, as I mentioned, was a classmate at RISD.
And there was always this kind of spirit between him and I that if we were in the same room, I always thought we could think of a big idea together.
And that left a deep impression on me.
Brian has this incredible ability to motivate people and get them excited and acting on ideas.
And I saw him, I witnessed that at RISD.
He'd have people volunteering on projects when people were pretty busy.
But they were actually giving him their time for his idea, which I was very impressed.
And so when I got to San Francisco, this is now 2006, the internet is coming back.
YouTube had just got acquired by Google for $1.2 billion.
It was like one of the biggest acquisitions post-dot-com burst.
And so there were starting to be these launch parties every week in San Francisco.
There was like this sort of influx of young people coming to now participate in this next version of the internet, Web 2 2.0, as they called it.
And so I started to realize like, oh my gosh, like Brian needs to be here.
And so I started calling him.
And he had moved to Los Angeles and had a life down there.
And I just remember saying, Brian, I don't know what you're doing down there, but the action is up here.
Like, this is where the world is congregating to build the next generation of the internet.
And it took him a little while, but eventually, I think one of the greatest decisions that he ever made was to leave his life behind in LA.
Would he say that?
Possibly.
I mean, he's a wildly successful CEO now.
Are you two still good friends?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, he's like a brother to me.
So he would say the same.
Sometimes, I mean, in big success stories, right?
You see at the end of an arduous journey together that people don't stay as close as they were when they started.
Well, we'll get to that.
Okay.
Jumped ahead.
So he moves up to San Francisco, packs his life in his Honda Civic, shows up one night, and I remember he comes into the apartment that I had rented.
And I'm carrying his stuff up the stairs, and there's this deep excitement that like, wow, we're reunited after being a year or two apart from campus, and like, it's just greenfield ahead of us.
Like, we can do whatever we want.
We can think of any big idea together.
And it was probably a week or two into his arriving that I'm checking the mailbox one day, get this letter, says my name, it's somebody property group.
Okay, open it up.
It's a letter from our landlord.
It says, Dear Joe, your rent is now 25% higher.
Love your landlord.
And I'm like, wait, I run to my online banking account and I go, oh, shit, we have a math problem here.
Rent is here.
My bank account is here.
We're going to get evicted from our apartment.
And I remember telling Brian the same, and, you know, both of us at this point were unemployed, you know, aspiring founders for something.
We didn't know what it was going to be.
And so it was in this moment of desperation, our backs are against the wall.
How are we going to save our apartment?
Where I was in the living room one day, my laptop open.
I was looking at a website for a design conference that we were going to go attend in San Francisco.
International design conference, thousands of designers coming from around the world.
And it said in big red letters, hotels sold out.
I remember thinking, hmm, where are people going to stay last minute?
I look up into the vastness of our tiny living room and think, hmm, I used to host people on this airbed in college.
I brought the airbed with me when I moved out here.
I pull it out.
I blew it up.
You know, those aerobeds.
I put it on the floor and realized, wait, we've got room for like one or two more aerobeds.
And so I emailed Brian and said, what do you think about renting out airbeds to other designers like us coming to the conference?
We can make it a really social experience.
We'll pick them up from the airport, give them breakfast in the morning, a subway pass.
All-inclusive B and B here.
All inclusive.
All inclusive.
And so he loved the idea.
And that night I was laying in bed.
And I was like, what are we going to call this?
It's like a designer bed and breakfast.
They're sleeping on airbeds.
maybe it's an air bed in breakfast so we make a I never knew that That's actually fascinating.
So we make airbedandbreakfast.com, an 18-character URL.
I don't recommend that for aspiring entrepreneurs.
A short URL.
And, you know, in a couple of days, we put together a five or six page website.
Pictures of us, pictures of the airbed.
Come stay with your new best friends.
Basically.
And so we charged way less than the hotels that had dramatically jacked up the rates.
Three or four X.
We were $80 a night, all-inclusive.
And we kind of put it out there.
Do you remember the first people who stayed with you?
Of course.
Because when you do something like this, at one point I was like, who's going to come?
Did you run them through a background search?
We definitely didn't have those capabilities at the time.
And so we put the website out and we had our next challenge, which was awareness.
Okay, we have this brand new website, but nobody knows to go to it.
So we emailed the conference who blasts it out to all 5,000 attendees.
Oh, wow.
Because they need some options.
All the design blogs picked up on our website.
And we had these headlines like, going to the IDSA, a conference in San Francisco, networking your jam jams with Joe and Brian.
So it was like, it got in the design world, it got out there, and we were flooded with people sending us their resumes, their design portfolios, their LinkedIn, trying to convince us why they should be one of the lucky three guests in our house.
And so we picked three guests, Kat, Omo, and Michael.
Okay, so you do remember them?
Still friends to this day.
It's incredible.
They came as strangers and left as friends.
And we got to really show them San Francisco through our eyes.
Our favorite burial spot in the mission.
the farmer's market on the weekends.
We had to friend's house parties together.
They got a really local lens.
And that was one of the things they told us.
It's like, wow, I just had never seen San Francisco in such a, you know, from such an insider point of view.
And on our end, the value we got was we made $1,000 and saved our apartment.
And thus the gears began to turn.
Hmm.
Could there be other people like us that would either love to help make ends meet financially or travel and see destinations through the eyes of a local?
And it was kind of like, huh.
But then we didn't work on it.
Because we thought, well, that was just a one-weekend experiment.
It just gave us some money to save Brent.
Now let's go think of the big idea.
So we whiteboarded for the next couple months.
And I remember going home for the holidays.
This is now December 2007.
And people would ask me, also Brian, when he went home, hey, so how's it going out in San Francisco?
And honestly, we didn't have a lot going on.
But we would say, well, you know, two, three months ago, we had people stay on airbeds in our apartment.
And they're like, did you know them?
I'm like, no, they were strangers.
They go, well, that's weird.
And the other half of the group at the Christmas parties would say, oh, that's really cool.
I would love to travel that way.
You know, are you guys expanding this?
And it was so distinctively polarizing.
Half people loved it, half people was like...
The original focus group.
The original focus group.
And it was triangulated because Brian had the exact same experience with his holiday gatherings.
So we came back in January.
We were like, did you, I had this, maybe this is the thing.
Maybe we just figure out how to do airbeds for conferences.
Wouldn't that be a big idea?
So we enrolled our third co-founder, Nate Busharzik, who was my roommate at the same time.
If you went back in time and said, you know, I think it was 2023, you could rent out the Barbie Dream House in Malibu on Airbnb.
Would you believe that?
Oh, it wasn't even called Airbnb at this point.
So Nate, who's a technical genius, computer science at Harvard, he was my roommate in the same apartment before Brian moved in.
He loved the idea of bringing people, using the internet to get people together in the real world.
And he says, guys, I'm on board.
So we put the next version out for South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, where the hotels sell out every year.
People have the same problem.
And so we thought this is the perfect place to relaunch our company, Airbed and Breakfast.
This is where Foursquare launched.
This is where Twitter launched.
Like, this is the rocket ship to the moon, the launch pad, is at South by Southwest.
So we get the next version of the site done, and we have a whopping two hosts sign up.
And we have a whopping two guests booked those hosts.
One of them was Brian.
So you could call this a complete flop.
That would be a generous term.
We came out of it and we got no press.
there was nothing, no signs of life to this idea.
And we thought, shoot, well, Nate sort of thinks, well, maybe this isn't the right idea.
He's got family life back in Boston.
He moves from San Francisco back to Boston.
Brian and I are sort of spinning our thumbs thinking like, I think there's something here.
It was so magical to host people in our apartment.
We just have to keep pushing.
So we decided we're going to relaunch again.
We saw the political conventions coming up in 2008, RNC and the DNC.
And we saw that as an opportunity to relaunch the product.
But this time, different.
This is going to be bigger than airbeds for conferences.
This is going to be a travel site where you could go anywhere at any time.
And up until this point in the history of the internet, if you booked a room, like a home on a classified website like Craigslist or sublets.com, the payment was typically in person or a wire to a stranger who you've never met.
That one's ripe for scam.
Cash in person in someone's bedroom, it's very awkward.
And so we thought, well, what if we bring the transaction online with a credit card?
And that's what we relaunched for the political conventions in 2008.
And it worked somewhat.
We had like 200, 300 people book reservations.
And for one weekend, it was essentially like, I remember thinking I called my mom, mom, we did it.
Launching a Company at Scale00:06:25
I launched a company.
It's working.
It's like my phone's ringing with customer service calls.
I'm like, oh my god, this is crazy.
People are actually using our site.
We're actually making some money.
The only problem is that there's not political conventions every weekend.
And so we came back down to earth to what's called the trough of sorrow.
This is a Silicon Valley term.
You have your launch of initiation, you're wearing off of novelty, and then you enter the Trough of Sorrow.
And the Trough of Sorrow is a very… What comes after the Trough of Sorrow?
there's the wiggles of false hope and so if you look at it does this continue like Is there funny names for all of this?
Yes, it keeps going.
Okay.
So if you look at the site traffic of a startup, almost everyone inevitably falls into this pattern.
You have some big launch, you get some press, people go check it out, you don't quite have product market fit.
And so the wearing off of novelty happens, and they move on to the next thing.
And then you enter the trough of sorrow, which is a complete flat line of traffic, meaning no new people are coming to your website.
And every so often you get a little bump, and you're like, oh, we're going to made it.
And it goes back down.
And the bump.
These are the wiggles of false hope.
Okay.
Yes.
And then there's the crash of ineptitude, which is where your servers go down.
And then there's other stages beyond that.
And so we were deep in the trough of sorrow.
Is this when you were selling cereal?
This is when we were up late at night.
I think it was 2 in the morning.
Brian and I are commiserating, just trying to keep our spirits high, thinking, ah, this isn't working.
We believe in this.
If enough people can just see this the same way that we did.
And it's around this time when McCain and Obama were like the hottest topic of the nation.
We thought we'd call it Airbed and Breakfast.
What if we gave a breakfast thing to our hosts to give their guests?
What if we did McCain's cereal and Obama's cereal?
And if we make boxes of cereal and send it out to hosts, that's weird.
Little did I know.
Somehow, that 2 a.m. kitchen conversation would turn into figuring out actually how to make breakfast cereal.
How do you make breakfast cereal, Katie?
Well, I actually can make cookie crisp with some flour.
You cook it in the oven.
You know what you're doing in the kitchen.
Let's do like bachelors in their 20s.
We don't know how to do that.
I can make artisanal cereal.
I don't think I can make mass-produced cereal.
So I did, I think the most logical next step is I called General Mills in Kellogg and said, hey, I'm so-and-so from Airbed and Breakfast, and we have this idea for politically themed breakfast cereal, thinking that they would actually do it or consider it.
I didn't even finish the pitch until I heard a dial tone.
I go, hello?
And they all hung up at me, basically.
Like, what a joke.
So then I was like, well, I'll call the regional Bay Area cereal producers.
And they at least listened to the pitch, but then they hung up.
So then it's like back to square one.
How do you make breakfast cereal?
The backdrop to this, by the way, is that the site has not been working.
Investors have not invested.
We're sinking deeper and deeper into debt on credit cards.
So who's told you no that you are now friends with?
And do you remember the first people who told you no?
Do you hold a grudge?
I don't hold a grudge.
Maybe except for the very, very first investor that we met with.
We met him at a place called University Cafe in Palo Alto, which University Cafe was the quintessential epicenter of founders raising money.
Meaning you go into this cafe.
It was a networking cafe.
It was the networking pitch cafe.
Everyone has one of those in their town where everyone goes to the same coffee shop where really no one's there for the coffee.
They're all there because it's like a nice place to have a conversation.
Correct.
And so unequivocally, you could scan across the cafe and there would be one or two founders with a hoodie on and somebody with a suit and tie on sitting across from them everywhere.
And so we get there and we're waiting, we're waiting, they're late.
You know, we got the demo all set up on my laptop.
Brian's going to give the pitch, which Brian's an amazing pitchman.
And then I'm going to do the demo.
And the guy shows up.
He goes sits down.
He goes, oh, wait, I'm going to get a smoothie.
And we're like, okay.
The line's like 15 minutes long.
We're sitting there.
He comes down, ponks down this gigantic smoothie with this pineapple and an umbrella and a big straw.
And he just sits there looking at the screen while Brian's giving the pitch, slurping on the smoothie the whole time.
And I'm like, all right.
And then I get into the demo.
Okay, so this is how it works.
You come to the homepage, you search your city.
Here's the research results.
You can look at all the listings.
Here's the price.
You click in, you see the host, the neighborhood information.
This guy's just like kind of nodding his head, like kind of skeptical, a skeptical slurper.
He's like, and then he picks his head up and goes, all right, thanks.
And he gets up and he leaves.
He's got a half-drunk smoothie left behind.
Brian and I are looking at each other.
I'm like, what the heck just happened?
Is he going to pay the parking meter?
Should we wait here for him?
I think we should wait, right, Brian?
Yeah, yeah, let's wait.
Another 20 minutes go by.
And then it dawned on us, obviously.
He left.
He left.
He just walked out.
Do you know who he is now today and see what he's doing?
I haven't checked in on that in a while.
But I remember thinking at the time, is this how every investor meeting is going to go?
It's a very catastrophic first investor meeting.
Thankfully, it got a little bit less rough from there, but we still didn't raise any money.
We got introduced to 20 people.
10 met us for coffee, zero invested.
And so that's when we did raise money from Visa.
How long did it take you from when you were like, all right, let's go and start raising money to being what you would consider a successful company?
it's years yeah years to figure this out you know because you have this challenge of how do you getting people to book accommodations online is not hard People have been doing that since hotels went online in the 90s.
Getting people to list a home to rent out online is very hard.
Connecting Guests in Berlin00:03:09
You know, 15 years ago, that was not a norm.
And so it took a long time to figure out the mechanics of how do you create Olympic-sized trust to allow somebody to rent out their home.
So you have to imagine how crazy the investor pitch sound.
You know, we have an idea for a website where people are going to rent out the most intimate parts of their homes to complete strangers on the internet.
So I'll be honest, I'm a big fan of a dummy Facebook account and a dummy Reddit account.
My favorite group to join is the Airbnb hosts because they have the best stories.
And so I've seen a lot of like the great parts of it and a lot of the like, oh my god, I just rented out my home to a complete stranger.
What's the biggest unforeseen challenge you've had with having people rent out their homes that you never foresaw when you were pitching this that you've come across now?
We've had billions of guest check-ins at this point.
So of course you're going to see a lot of life all over the planet.
I mean we're in pretty much every non-OFAC country around the world.
So you get funny stories of what people leave behind.
Actually a very heartwarming story of a guy who was a soldier on the Berlin Wall in the 1960s, early 1960s.
And he was on the west side of Germany and he would patrol the wall and there'd be some guard on the other side and they'd kind of look at each other every night.
And he ended up leaving Germany because of the atrocities that he saw.
He was so heartbroken and he never wanted to go back.
So fast forward, years later, his daughter convinces him to go back to maternity, to Germany, first time in like 40-something years.
And they get to the listing, their host welcomes them, it's an older fellow.
They're walking through the apartment and I asked, you know, like you're German, like, when were you here?
He's like, oh, I used to be on the border wall as a patrolman.
Oh, yeah, meet you.
Meet you.
Which side?
Oh, it's on the west.
Oh, I was on the east.
They figure out that they were the two guys looking at each other 40-something years earlier as adversaries on the opposite side of the Berlin Wall.
And here they are now.
Now they're sitting on a couch.
They're in tears.
Because for the guest, this is like a reconciliation visit for him to make amends with his past.
And of all the people.
In all the world.
In all the world.
Brought together.
Brought together.
Which is your original vision.
Yeah.
I mean, like, that's, it doesn't happen every day, obviously, but that's, you know, Airbnb at its finest are those kind of connective moments where people have to realize something about themselves or about the place they're visiting that they otherwise couldn't have gotten in a hotel.
A Monk's Reconciliation Visit00:02:24
What's your favorite Airbnb you've stayed in?
Ooh, I've been in so many.
God, that's like, who's your favorite child?
I don't know.
It's like there's so many good ones.
We only have one, so it's like not hard to pick your favorite.
I would say that I stayed with a Buddhist monk in Japan one New Year's Eve.
So you just like book it through the listing?
Yeah.
So I booked this listing in southern Japan with a Buddhist monk who rents a tatami mat on his Buddhist temple inside his Buddhist temple for $40 a night.
And this guy's name was Hosan.
He had his 90-year-old mother living at the temple with him.
And it was the most phenomenal experience I've ever had.
I'd wake up at 5 a.m., you'd meditate with him in the temple.
He does his chants and he's lighting the incense and beating the drum, you know, and he'd cook meals, had said, really traditional Japanese meals.
And then he would take me to the things that he did as a monk.
And so I would go into the village with him.
It was a very remote village, by the way.
Like hundreds of people, you know, like very small.
And you're like, this is what I do for New Year's Eve?
This is like my kind of New Year's Eve trip.
Yeah.
And so it was like a five-day trip.
And we go into people's homes and like he does some ceremony to honor a deceased relative with their shrine in their home.
And I'm just, I'm there and like, am I supposed to be here right now?
You know, it was like he would give me access to these things.
We went to an onsen together.
It was just my first experience at a Japanese bathhouse.
And so I'm watching him in the locker room.
He takes his shirt off, it's my shirt off, takes his pants off, take my pants off.
He strips down.
I strip down.
I'm like, all right, I'm all in here.
And so we walk into the kind of bathhouse area.
We get into one of the plunges.
And it's pure silence.
I'm the only Westerner, probably for many miles.
And all you can hear is the drip, drip from the faucet into this big pool.
It's steamy, it's hot.
And he breaks the silence and he goes, Josan, what is your soul's vitamin?
The kind of thing only a monk would ask you.
What's your soul's vitamin?
Yeah.
Stripping Down in the Onsen00:04:28
It's a great question.
What's the answer?
Well, it took me a while to figure it out.
But at that time, at that psych, like that phase of Airbnb, I was leading the product team.
My soul's vitamin was, how do I help my team do the best work of their life?
You know, like, what would it look like if that year people come back to me and said, Joe, like, as an engineer, software engineer, as a designer, as a PM or researcher, actually did the best work of my career.
And so it became my mission that year to figure out how do I create an environment for my people, my team, to have that experience.
So I have two follow-ups for you.
What's your Airbnb pick?
A treehouse, a yurt, or a Glasdale?
Treehouse, all the way.
Come on, who doesn't want to feel like a kid again?
You don't feel like a yurt, though, like looking under the star?
Like, that would be cool too.
Maybe.
I think I like what I call budget time machines.
Things that quickly bring you back to feeling like a kid.
For me, that's like a swing set.
So if you could turn one national landmark into an Airbnb, which one are you picking?
Lincoln bedroom.
Without a doubt.
So which brings us to what are we doing here in Washington, D.C.?
And how did the guy who sold Obama O's get himself into the Trump White House?
At what point did you know in the last election that you were like, I want to help President Trump?
Was it Bobby Kennedy and your love for Maha?
Like, what was it?
Was it that Silicon Valley all getting behind President Trump this election?
Was there one moment?
What was it?
I think there were a lot of moments.
You know, as a young Democrat, you know, in college, I think I first voted for Al Gore back in the day.
The first time I could actually vote.
I can't believe you would admit to that.
Well, I mean, what?
I was 18 in art school in Providence.
Not a particularly conservative place.
Anyway, so I've been on my journey.
Everyone's been on the journey.
And I think through, you know, certainly Bobby Kennedy and supporting him and being so grateful for the work that he's doing to be somebody who just cares so much about the health of our nation.
And, you know, there's no ties to industry and is really just able to bust through walls and sort of like, you know, right size the ship.
ship, I'd say.
I grew up in an alternative medicine, health, food household, credit to my mom for the original maha mom?
The original maha mom, yes.
She was in the early 80s beating the drum.
And so, you know, I grew up in a very weird household.
Like, you know, we were vegetarian, macrobiotic, in fact, which is like even more weird version of vegetarian.
Explain that for a second.
Acrobatic.
Yeah.
It's like a Japanese version of vegetarianism.
Okay.
So it's like very specific in the way that you cook things and auto legumes.
I would say like explain it for the viewers, but I'd also explain it for myself.
Yeah, yeah.
Take like the fringe of being a vegetarian and like that's that.
So it'd be like we were growing up in the South, going to my friends' houses for like hot dogs and hamburgers and like I can't eat it and everyone's like, why can't you have a hot dog?
Did your mom like do the 80-20 rule or you were like going to kids' parties not eating the Domino's pizza?
I didn't have the Domino's pizza, especially if it had peperulium on it.
Anyway, so like she instilled this idea that like just very simple ideas that like you know your health is based on the quality of your cells and your cells, the health of your cells is based on the food that you put in your body.
So if you bring bad things in, then you can eat the bad cells and enough bad cells leads to disease.
And she kept me off antibiotics for forever.
I was probably like 18 until I had antibiotics.
Are you vaccinated?
The basics.
Yeah, she did an amazing job educating us and just helping us understand the quality of food that you put in in terms of the quality of your health.
Understanding Government Experiences00:15:07
And so fast forward to Bobby Kennedy.
It's like he's saying that at a national stage of why don't we correct our health and move from what I believe of what he calls sick care, which is the world we live in today, into what probably we should call healthcare, which is about the preventative stuff, about living a healthy lifestyle, about exercising, about eating the right foods.
And so huge supporter of him, and just been so excited to see his ascendance into the- But going from Bobby Kennedy to President Trump is a bit of a jump.
Yes, of course.
So other things that influence this.
Early, I think it was early 2021, mid-2021, the activity at the border caught my attention.
And I just remember thinking, what's going on with this topic?
It seems as if there's no border.
And as it got worse that year, I felt like I needed to understand this problem more.
So I reached out to my friends, largely on the Democratic side of the house, at all levels, from the highest level all the way down, and had conversations, just trying to piece together.
I was like, hey, what am I missing about this?
Fill me in.
And I got some answers, but felt unfulfilled.
And so I've been lucky enough to call Josh Kushner, one of my close friends, for a long time.
We met at an Allen conference many, many years ago.
And we were the two youngest guys in the room who were like, who are you?
Let's hang out.
So through him, I've gotten to know Jared.
And so I get on the phone with Jared.
I'm like, can you help me fill in the gaps for me?
Like, what am I missing here?
Is this normal?
Like, it seems there's no enforcement of our own border.
Don't nations need borders to be a nation?
And so he put me on this, I've said this curriculum of just talking to experts in the field.
And I remember just being like, holy cow, this is crazy.
Like, this is not right.
This is a real problem.
And there's no reason why we shouldn't be enforcing the laws of our country and our border.
And so I think as I started to pull in that thread, I sort of, you know, began to look at other topics and eventually came to the point where I don't think I can support a political party that wants to have an open border, that lets in criminals and dangerous people in our country.
That's not something I get behind.
And so when Elon said he was doing Doge, was it at that point that you were like, I want to give this a shot and try working in the federal government and redesigning retirement, which is where you spent your time?
Well, so I can't.
How many people get out of bed in the morning?
They're like, you know what I want to do today?
I want to redesign retirement.
That's it.
I don't think a lot of people say that.
So I came for Bobby Kennedy's confirmation hearings in late January.
And Elon sends me a text and says, hey, here in your town, do you want to come by and hang with the Doge team?
And I thought, yeah, why not?
So I changed my flight and hang out with the team for a day.
And I was blown away.
Because up until this point, the idea of what I prefer is like Silicon Valley speed.
You move fast, you know, you ship things, you know, you just move quickly.
Like that never to me corresponded with DC.
You know, DC, in my mind, is never really attractive to me because it just has a stereotype of being slow and bureaucratic and hard to get stuff done.
And so hanging with the Doge team, I was like, okay, well, this is an interesting entry point with which to potentially bring some of the spirit of Silicon Valley to getting things done quickly.
And so throughout the day, I was asking people, so you're going to rebuild that system.
Who's designing the interface for that?
And I couldn't get a straight answer.
People are like, well, we don't have anybody.
And by the end of the day, they go, Do you want to come on board and help us with that?
Do you want to also take this unpaid free job?
I was like, guys, guys, thank you.
But I have a lot of plans this year.
I live in Austin.
And just, you know, kind of thanks, but no thanks.
And then on the flight back, I contemplated and I thought, hmm, this is actually a once-in-a-lifetime moment.
Were you back a week later or two weeks later?
You have a president who cares about this with Elon spending time on this.
And I just realized this is truly once-in-a-lifetime moment in history.
I thought, you know, I'll give it six months.
And I called them back and I said, great, we've got this problem.
And it has to do with a mine.
I'm like, what?
A mine?
And so sure enough, of course.
So Elon called you saying he has a problem with a mine.
Yes.
And you're the only man who can fix the mine.
I'm sure there were others, but I thought this is a weird problem.
And I love solving problems.
So why not?
Let's go for it.
So throughout fixing federal retirement, which now you've gotten a process down from how many years to how many days?
Well, we're about to announce that, so we'll have that announcement very soon.
Okay, what's the quickest you've done a federal retirement we've done it in days, which up to six months.
Okay.
And when you talk to those middle managers, and now you're able to help them do their job better, what do they say to you when you're like coming in from the outside?
They don't know you.
They've been doing this for years.
What do they say to you?
Well, the federal government has been trying to solve retirement for federal employees for over 20 years.
This goes back to the Bush administration in 2002, 2003, which is that retirement happens on paper.
And so paper takes a long time to move around.
It's ripe for errors.
People miss signature fields and form fields.
So every administration has tried to solve this problem over the years to digitize the process.
Unsuccessfully, collectively, $100 million has been spent on contractors that have never delivered.
Presidents have ended up just throwing more headcount on the problem to speed it up.
Not very scalable solution.
And so when this landed on my lap, it's like, well, I actually had no idea how we were going to do it.
I remember the first meeting and I was like, what did I get myself into?
Like, I actually have no concept of how this is actually going to come together.
But sure enough, like working highly collaboratively with the careers in retirement services and building up trust over the months, eventually we cracked the code and have digitized it, where now every retirement in the government takes place online as of August 1st of this year.
The careers, I think they're over the moon.
I think they're just very happy that a group of people showed up.
I brought in some top-tier tech talent, top-tier design talent from my network.
And collectively we were able to do the impossible.
So Elon left Doge in May.
We are now in August.
So walk me through the transition from what Doge was and what you were doing to your meeting last week in the Oval Office with President Trump.
So while I've been fixing retirement, I've also been getting reached out to you by cabinet secretaries, directors of agencies saying, Joe, can you please help?
I heard you're on campus.
My agency website and experience needs redesign.
It's out of date.
It's clunky.
Can you breathe some earbud spirit into it?
And so I think over the last couple months, I've been getting all this demand.
I'm thinking, all right, this is interesting.
I'm inclined to say yes, I like these challenges, but I think this needs to be a bigger thing.
This can't just be like doing one website at a time.
What if this was a much bigger idea?
What if this was an idea around a national movement, a presidential movement, anointed by the president, to really upgrade the interface to society?
There's no one who cares about design more than President Trump.
I know, which is what's so interesting.
It's like, we have somebody who cares about presentation, cares about the way things look, because that matters.
And so, you know, the gears started to turn and I started to think, well, maybe there's a bigger idea.
So I put together what has been called, the president's calling America by Design, which is this national initiative to beautify and improve the usability and the aesthetics of the websites and experiences of Americans.
And Katie, if you think about it, as we continue to be more online as a society, the front door to the U.S. government, it's not a building.
It's a website or an app.
It's a browser or a phone.
That's how people are experiencing our government.
It's not walking into the lobby of a building somewhere.
Sure, that happens, but that's not the majority of how people consume or interact with their government.
And so why wouldn't we treat our websites the same way we would with the care of a nice lobby with beautiful lighting, you know, polished floors?
What was your example about graffiti that you gave the president?
Oh yeah, it's like the big push with him and Stephen Mueller two weekends ago to clear graffiti out of DC, to beautify DC.
It's kind of like when an American goes to a .gov website and the usability is below average, the aesthetics are below average.
To me, that's like graffiti on the public.
And so America by Design is going to clean up the digital graffiti.
So the president signed an executive order designating a chief design officer of the United States and our first chief design officer is you.
What does that mean to you to be the first chief design officer where the position didn't even exist?
Would you call this like the third startup?
Maybe.
I'm an honor, it's a real privilege.
I'm going to do my best to make government websites as usable as they are beautiful and really upgrade our nation to the level of excellence that I feel like the United States deserves.
So you said that you always knew DC was slow and bureaucratic and that's why you don't want to come here.
Obviously it is, right?
We're not going to dispute that it's not.
But what's been the other most surprising part of like now being in the DC ecosystem compared to the Silicon Valley ecosystem?
One thing that comes to mind is it's kind of like San Francisco in that it's somewhat of a monoculture.
Like you're in NSF, it's for tech.
If you're in DC, it's for politics.
So everyone can commiserate with each other on similar topics.
When you're working at Airbnb, it's about your shareholder value, right?
Or delivering for profits.
But when you're doing America by Design and say Doge and working for President Trump, it's about the public's perception of what you're doing.
How are you more responsive or different responsive, I would say, differently responsive to consumers, given that it's not a private company, but very much a public one?
Well, you know, I think with America by Design, it's thinking about what does it look like to bring consumer-grade experiences to the government with the American people as the consumer.
Like the same way Airbn thinks about it or any tech company that creates a consumer product, you have to constantly be updating.
You have to constantly be iterating, constantly be responsive to the customer.
And so I'm excited because I think we have an opportunity to actually treat these digital experiences the same way you treat a consumer app.
So what's your first website that you're redesigning?
We're working on a couple already.
Is it recreation.gov?
We're working on a couple already.
There's a lot of very excited cabinet members who are finally getting upgrades to some very outdated experiences.
Did you know, in my research, there's over 7,000 .gov websites.
Wow.
Over 26,000 portals.
How many should be shut down?
That's not for me to determine right now, but the top nine websites in the government, from the IRS all the way down, have every single month 157 million Americans going to them.
Think about that.
Imagine 157 million Americans walking into a building.
You would make sure that building is spotless.
You would make sure that building is well attended.
It's got, you know, it has all the details figured out.
Because that is the impression that you're leaving on America, on Americans.
I think this is a historic time in our nation from just a chance to upgrade.
And the other thing I learned throughout all this is this happened once before under a different administration.
President Nixon in the early 1970s created a federal beautification project, also a national initiative, to upgrade the government to the design standards of that era.
So obviously this is pre-internet.
So they hired the best graphic designers of the time.
Then they came through Washington.
Charles Eames, one of my heroes, was a part of this and actually contributed.
I think that goes to show that when there's a presidential national initiative to do this kind of work, it does attract the best and brightest of our time.
It's no secret that President Trump is a polarizing figure.
What has it been like for you in your personal life going from Silicon Valley, which is predominantly Democrat, to moving into a very public role in President Trump's administration?
I mean, I can only speak for myself, which is, you know, you lose friends, you lose, you know, people who don't want to speak to you anymore just because of your political views.
What's that experience been like for you?
Attracting Best and Brightest Talent00:05:28
It was pretty unpleasant at first.
You know, if you go back to February when I got involved, there were a lot of people who were neutral, a lot of people who were positive, and then an equal amount of people who were just hateful.
And I remember thinking, like, ah, you know, if it's a stranger on the internet calling you, you know, something, it's not a big deal.
But if it's somebody that you worked with for a long time, you know, like, it hits different.
It's like the fact that I was working on fixing retirement in the government, you know, to help the 100,000 people who retire every year have a better experience.
Like, the hate mail text messages that I got was like disheartening, to say the least.
And then eventually, you know, I guess that was my first experience with like it being so intense.
And so it was just depressing for some period of time.
And then eventually, it transitioned to, I liken it to like a bee sting.
It's like, ah, that kind of hurt.
But like a few hours later, it's gone.
Do you still hang out with the same people in the same social circle, or has that changed because of your affiliations?
By and large, I think it hasn't changed the core groups the same.
Certainly on the fringes, maybe that's changed a little bit.
So your success, we're going to get into the fun section now.
Would not be the Katie Miller podcast without taking a little bit of a left turn or a right turn, whichever you're going to call.
You're an elite club of about 2,800 billionaires worldwide.
How many other?
2,800.
2,800.
Yeah.
That's what the internet says.
How has money changed you?
I hate this question.
Yeah.
And you're going to answer it.
I don't know.
It's allowed me to give a lot of money away, which is a joy.
One thing I'll be able to do is because of my timeline in life changed as a result of discovering the work of Charles and Ray Eames, as I mentioned in college.
I started the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity.
And so this is a nonprofit to steward the legacy of Charles and Ray into the future.
What's been the most rewarding thing you've given money to?
The first time I fully funded a scholarship at RISD.
But the minute I had money to do that, I was like, that was, first thing I did, let me back up.
First thing I did is paid off my car loan.
What was the car at the time?
VWGTI.
Second thing I did is, you know, it was always a stretch.
I felt like I put unnecessary pressure on my parents with sending me to a private design school and the burden that that was for them.
Always in the back of my mind, I was like, man, one day I can't wait to pay them back.
And so I literally cut them a check and paid them back for college.
And that was one of the most special moments in my life where I just felt like, wow, thank you for trusting me, investing in me, whatever you want to think about.
What'd they do with the money?
Well, they paid off the mortgage of their house and became debt-free.
And I think it helped them ease into retirement a little bit better.
And then the RISD scholarship was the next thing on my list.
It's like, okay, Carl, I'm gone.
Parents pay back in full.
Let's send somebody to RISD who otherwise would never have a chance to go there because it's so damn expensive.
If you could go back in time and explain to your 10-year-old self what being a billionaire is like, how would you explain it?
Joey, you're going to love it.
What's the craziest thing you've spent money on that you're like, shit.
Oh, man.
Let's see.
Oh, I got one for you.
I think I'm still a generally frugal person.
Like, when you grow up middle class and you come into money, I think, like, somebody told me once, more money just makes you more of who you are.
Okay.
And so my favorite movie growing up was Back to the Future, Michael J. Fox, and the scene where he pulls out the hoverboard and goes across the lake.
Like as a kid, I was not able to discern between reality and, you know, special effects.
For all I knew, the hoverboard was a real thing.
And for whatever reason, somebody told me that you could get one at Disney World.
And so I begged my parents to go to Disney World so we could get a hoverboard.
And you can only imagine my face and my reaction when we show up in Orlando, Florida.
And there's no hoverboard.
It doesn't exist.
I was crushed as a kid.
That stuck with me.
And so later in life, as an adult, with a little bit of some extra money, I tracked down and purchased the hoverboard that was used in the film Back to the Future.
Where is it now?
It's on the wall in my living room.
That's so cool.
Such an interesting flex.
Billionaire romance novels are the big thing among the suburban moms.
I'm sure you know this.
I have no idea about this.
The Missing Disney Hoverboard00:10:14
No, you don't.
Just tell me.
Oh, gosh.
It's like the number one, like, I think, fiction out there that's being read on e-readers for women.
And they're all about romance novels, a billionaire taking a girl on a date.
So we're going to ask you, what's the date that a billionaire takes a girl on?
I don't know.
It probably involves a helicopter.
I guess I gotta go somewhere that's just super plans not read a state Probably.
You really don't know this?
Like, what's a crazy date?
Okay, now we're going to ask the end.
Do you want to make up something?
No!
No, never mind then.
I guess this doesn't apply to you.
But you really don't know that there's a whole genre of books?
It's the first I've heard.
Why would I know this?
I am clearly outside the target market.
Have you ever seen 50 Shades?
Never.
I think it came out when I was building the company.
There's a whole era of media that I'm not familiar with.
Okay, fine.
Fun fact: I didn't see Game of Thrones until like two years ago.
Huh.
Because it came out when we were building Airbnb.
Yeah, so you just never watched it.
No, I didn't watch anything.
You've also met a lot of rich people.
Which one are you most unimpressed by?
Come on.
I'm going to go onto the internet.
Okay, bye.
All right.
We've played this game now twice on the show.
Once with JD Vance, where you could only answer that of a fellow cabinet member and with Senator Katie Britt, and she could only answer that of a fellow senator.
You're going to only answer these questions with that of a fellow tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley.
I mean, guess they're anywhere, right?
Austin, too.
Who would you like cook dinner for you and your family?
Who would I like cook dinner?
Given that you're Maha, I feel like this is a much harder question than for most people because you are very specific.
I want to give you something good, but I don't know why.
Okay.
Who would you trust to build a campfire without matches or a lighter?
Josh Kushner.
Who would you pick as a partner in an escape room?
Brian Jeski.
What's your daily routine like at home?
It's kind of Maha-inspired.
When I get up, the first thing I try to do is stand on grass barefoot and look towards the sun.
So maybe this is like Huberman-inspired as well.
Try to get natural light in the morning, do my stretches, you know, kind of wake my body up, hit the gym.
Do you spray that grass with pesticides?
Of course not.
You crazy?
Drink my celery juice, check the email, and then speed down to downtown DC.
What do you eat on an average day?
What do I eat?
Yeah.
Try to have a balanced diet.
Get the right macros of carbs, protein, fats.
What keeps you grounded?
I've got four friends from Georgia, my childhood friends.
We go on a trip every year and we're in the tech start together.
And there's something about seeing Connect with them that reminds me of where I came from.
And, you know, this kid from Georgia that worked hard and had a good idea.
And I'm so grateful for it.
And I don't know.
They're just one of many things that helped me keep grounded.
All right.
We're going to play a game of Would You Rather?
Well, let's do it.
We've done this now every episode.
Okay.
Would you rather be stuck in a never-ending Zoom with bureaucrats or a never-ending group chat with venture capitalists?
Put me with the VCs.
I'll homeowner.
Would you rather stay in an Airbnb made of Legos or read Airbnb reviews written only in emojis?
Legos, I think you come out with a better story.
Which process would you rather redesign?
The DMB or TSA?
Oh man.
Both?
TSA would be amazing though.
Would you rather have unlimited ideas but no time to execute them or unlimited time but only one idea?
I like shipping, so unlimited time, one idea.
Which would you rather be tasked to do?
Make jury duty fun or make parking tickets popular?
Let's make jury duty fun.
Let's make it fun for people to serve their country that way.
Would you rather spend $1 million on wine or on a watch?
A watch.
Do you drink wine?
Do you have like a large, or are you like more a watch collector?
I like a good vintage Bordeaux.
Like a Bordeaux from the 80s is like an amazing experience.
It's like wine that just kind of floats on the top of your tongue.
It kind of floats.
What's the most overrated travel destination?
More people go to Paris and France than any other country in the world every year.
Is that where most people book their Airbnbs?
Yes.
So I think, you know, I like getting off the beaten path.
I like finding the unexplored places.
What's been the most interesting travel fact you've learned by now operating Airbnb?
So one of the craziest travel facts is that during the World Cup in Brazil, one in four people that attended were staying on an Airbnb.
That's crazy.
That's crazy, right?
On a peak night in summer, I think we had three to four million people on one night staying in a home with somebody all over the world.
So why did you decide to leave Airbnb?
I decided to leave the day-to-day of Airbnb in 2022.
It was been 14 years, and we got through COVID.
We had our most successful quarter after going public earlier that year.
I remember looking around the room and seeing this incredible executive team that was fine-tuned to help take the company into the next stage and thinking, I love early stage ideas.
I love being at the initiation of something.
And we're in such a good place as a company.
Maybe it's time for me to get back to that, to the initiation, to the sort of germ of idea that you can breathe some life into and give it shape and color.
I had conversations with my co-founders, of course, and staying very connected to them, serve on the board of directors, of course, attend the big product reviews that happen two or three times a year.
So I think I'm still connected and contributing in ways that are valuable to the company, and I hope to as long as I'm still considered useful.
But I think there's something very important about our story, which is the nature of my relationship with my co-founders is started with friendship, continued with friendship, and exists today in friendship.
Do you think your monetary success has given you the ability to say, hey, I'm going to leave and just start something new versus someone who is still hustling at their same idea?
Sure.
I mean, yeah, I mean, there's options that are created.
What's been the craziest idea or worst idea you've given to your co-founders that they have not used for Airbnb?
I want to know what's gone in the delete file.
Well, one that did go through, a very small one, was to be able to filter search results of listings by whether they have a piano or not.
That one did go through.
I love playing piano, so that worked out well.
We'll go back to, you've obviously been very successful, and people obviously pitch you on ideas probably all the time for money and venture and capital, all that stuff, right?
What's been the worst idea you've been pitched?
And on the flip side of it, what's the best company you've invested money into?
I just invested into a company that allows you to have an iPad, and you can sketch an idea for a product, and it immediately renders it with like a photographic rendering, and then can turn it into production drawings in the same app to go have it made somewhere.
Oh, that's cool.
It's very cool.
And it's kind of like the thing I always wish I had, like when I was a young entrepreneur coming up with product ideas.
Do you have a hard time deciphering who comes to you because they actually want to be your friend versus who's coming to you because they just want to pitch you on an idea or gain access to your wealth or status?
It's hard sometimes to know intentions.
There's a lot of people asking for stuff and it's just, you know, you gotta get really good at like, you know, what's really going on here.
And so.
All right.
What's on your lock screen right now?
My lock screen.
Yeah.
This is a beautiful background.
I don't know, it's like a beautiful picture.
Landscapes?
Yeah.
What's the last book you read?
Well, the act book I read was reading up on the history of design in the U.S. government.
It's a page turner.
For me, it is.
What's your favorite song right now?
This is a great electronic music song called Set Me Free.
Who threw the last great party you attended?
Jeff Bezos' wedding was absolutely amazing.
Do you prefer text or call?
I think calls just get to it, you know.
Are you an early bird or a night owl?
I don't get a lot of sleep, so kind of both.
What's the best invention of all time?
I think Christianity should be considered up there as an idea that has endured thousands of years.
Are you religious?
I was when I grew up, and I do believe in God.
What's more likely to inspire innovation?
A long shower, a long run, or a long flight?
Shower, for sure.
There's a saying that if you've ever had an idea, you've taken a shower.
How long is the longest shower?
I don't want to get too, you know, pruny, but you know.
If you could host a dinner party with three people, dead or alive, who's sitting at the table and what are you eating?
All right.
You know, I go with like Steve Jobs, Roosevelt, Charles Eames.
Ideas Born from Long Showers00:01:55
And I hope we're just enjoying like some good pepperoni pizza.
Is that because your mom never let you eat it?
Yes.
What's your favorite pizza?
I mean, that's it.
No, but like from where?
Are you like ordering from a specific place and you making it yourself?
Oh, there's a pizza place in Untville, California, in Napa Valley, that makes the greatest pizza.
Thank you, Joe, for doing this.
Thanks, Katie.
It's a lot of fun.
So you asked me what we give out on our swag bags on the Katie Miller podcast.
Well, we do it personalized.
And so I wanted to give you this.
I want you to open it.
Oh, my God.
It is your executive order.
Wow.
Blue lined.
Yes.
Signed by the president.
No kidding.
This is so special.
Look at that.
Improving our nation through better design.
Talking about America by design, the National Design Studio, and the Chief Design Officer.
This is so cool.
Wow.
Thank you so much.
You're welcome.
All right.
So what's next for Joe?
We're recruiting.
We're bringing in the best talent of our era.
The best designers, the best software engineers are coming to DC.
I'm on the phone with them.
I've been on the phone with them all week.
And we're really creating a very historic team here.
Thank you so much, Joe, for joining.
And thank you all for watching the Katie Miller podcast.
Please remember to like, subscribe, follow.
We're on YouTube, Rumble, X, Spotify, and Apple.
Thank you so much for watching and we hope to see you every Monday at 6 P.M.