Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, 44, says he once felt out of place in Silicon Valley because his passion for bodybuilding clashed with a tech culture that did not value weightlifting. 

Chesky arrived in Silicon Valley in the late 2000s as a former college hockey player and competitive bodybuilder, a profile that was at odds with the stereotypical image of a skinny, sleep-deprived founder. 

“When I came to Silicon Valley, I was slightly self-conscious about wearing long-sleeve shirts because I thought if I wear a short-sleeve shirt, people will think I’m a meathead and therefore an idiot,” he said on a recent livestream of the tech and business talk show TBPN. “People just didn’t really lift weights in 2007, 2008.”

The culture around him has since shifted dramatically, with fitness and longevity now deeply intertwined with Silicon Valley’s self-image. Chesky admits he has been surprised to see the tech community embrace serious fitness training and nutrition science. He sees the tech community’s interest in bodybuilding as a positive development and is excited that more people are embracing fitness. 

Chesky applies lessons from bodybuilding to how he thinks about building Airbnb. “You don’t get in shape in one workout — it’s 1% a day,” he said on the livestream. 

In the same way, in Silicon Valley, “it’s not about one idea. It’s about grinding every single day year-over-year with consistency,” he said. 

Chesky says that Silicon Valley “overnight successes” actually take “thousands of days,” mirroring the slow, incremental progress of strength training. He said that both fitness and entrepreneurship reward the willingness to show up and work, even when results take time. 

Chesky doesn’t use AI in the gym, relying instead on a human personal trainer who was a former Mr. Universe for workouts. However, he does use AI for nutrition advice. For example, he recently got his bloodwork done and uploaded the results to an AI chatbot for analysis. From that move, he found out that he was short on Vitamin D, so he started taking a supplement for it. 

Chesky is famous for popularizing a “founder mode” style of management, in which founders interact with employees across the organization, not just their direct reports. He personally manages 40 to 50 employees as direct reports, he disclosed on the “Social Radars” podcast last year. He called the process “a lot of work,” but “necessary.”

“What you need to do is you need to have relationships with as many people as possible,” Chesky said on the podcast.

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