VOICES
IF YOU WANT to make a private phone call
in the office-free workspace of Airbnb’s San
Francisco headquarters, you need to retreat to
a tiny windowless room with a narrow couch
nestled between shag-carpeted walls. It’s where
Chip Conley, the company’s head of global
hospitality and strategy, has chosen to talk to a
visitor, and where Conley, a tall, lean man who
brims with Zen-like energy (he meditates twice
daily), settles in as he describes the approach to
hospitality he formed as a 26-year-old, when he
started Joie de Vivre Hotels.
“There were very few companies in the world
whose name was also the mission of the com-
pany,” says Conley, “but our whole premise was
celebrating the joy of life, for employees as well
as guests. We wanted you to feel like we were
entertaining you in our own home.”
Joie de Vivre even called its front desk clerks
“hosts,” a notion that is not lost on Conley
today. “That was 30 years ago,” he says, “and
weirdly, I’m now at Airbnb, helping our hosts
be great at hospitality.”
If Conley seemed an unlikely choice to
guide Airbnb’s 1.4 million hosts worldwide
in helping guests feel at home, he’s not. When
the company hired him four years ago, Airbnb
executives were looking for someone who
could make their guest experience more con-
sistent — and place Airbnb solidly alongside
traditional hotels. Who better than Conley?
He had bucked conventional wisdom before,
proving his mettle as an entrepreneur with an
unconventional 52-property boutique hotel
chain and as a thought leader, with four books,
including Peak: How Great Companies Get Their
Mojo from Maslow, to his credit.
Even before then, Conley was used to
breaking new ground. When he arrived in San
Francisco 30 years ago, after completing his
Stanford undergraduate and Master of Business
Administration degrees, the Long Beach native
planned to become a real estate developer. But
finding the profession dry, he decided to open
“Every hotel was based
on a magazine. We came
up with five adjectives
that defined that
magazine, and created a
hotel around that.”
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