Marin Magazine - SPACES January 2017

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