Why Can't a Company Grow Faster Than Its Chief Executive?

Brian Chesky says a company cannot grow faster than its chief executive's learning curve, and he believed the limit of Airbnb's potential was the limit of him. In the mid-2010s or the late 2010s Airbnb kept growing and was clearly chaos at the same time. He did not know how to manage the chaos, how to manage excellence, or how to align everyone in one direction. It felt like sand falling through his fingers.

He wondered all the time whether he was the right person for the job. He felt almost imprisoned and did not know if he would ever have the capacity to be a great chief executive. He had watched failure after failure when a founder left. He did not know how to get out, so he told himself he needed to run Airbnb long term. He looked for presidents and chief operating officers and hired them. Hiring them was not really successful. He never told the board to find someone to replace him. Airbnb was not nosediving. It was still growing.

Meetings about meetings showed up, and people went in many different directions. A lot of AI companies are in that pattern now, with too many people doing too many things.