Airbnb founder Brian Chesky turned to his dad's words to get through the darkest days of 2020

2020 was a bit of a rollercoaster year for vacation rental giant Airbnb. The company was planning on going public this year, then the pandemic hit and most of the world went into lockdown.

As the company went into damage control mode and secured debt financing, April saw Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky stress-baking to combat the paralyzing effect of the pandemic on the travel industry. “In this crisis, it felt like I was a captain of a ship and a torpedo hit the side of the ship," Chesky had said in an interview at the time.

Eight months later, the company was the biggest U.S initial public offering of 2020, valued at just over $100 billion. But it was a tough road there.


Also read: 2020: The Year Of The New Normal

For a while in between, the company was staring into “what felt like an abyss for travel” and had to “rebuild the company from the ground up” according to Chesky. The co-founder recently took to Twitter to share what helped him get through some of the year’s “darkest days”.

He tweeted: “During our darkest days this year, I would remind myself of a saying my dad would tell me growing up: Things are never as good as they seem or as bad as they seem.” Chesky says he still tells himself this.


Chesky believes that a large part of getting through a crisis is believing you will get through.

“Believing leads to curiosity, and curiosity opens the door to creative solutions - exactly what you need when the going gets tough,” he tweeted, stressing that that conviction needs to come from the leaders themselves. “If you are in a position of leadership, your own psychology becomes the psychology of your team.”