Brian Chesky

I think what happened was there were a lot of good people that became web designers, but I think there became a gap between web design and engineering.

You had people that maybe didn't have the full design skill set, and what happened was this function emerged called product management.

Product management, I'm not arguing against.

We have product managers.

It's very important.

But in industrial design, there's no product managers for the most part.

They're industrial designers.

In architecture, the architect is the product manager.

And so I think what ended up happening in web design, designers are very, very narrow.

There was a void.

Product managers filled that void.

I'm not arguing against that model.

But I think if designers sit out, what you're going to see is engineers and product managers designing for them.

And I think the counterpoint is designers can be engineers and product people for all intents and purposes.

Said differently, if I were starting Airbnb today, I'd be vibe coding and cloud code.

And I'm trying to do it now.

I'm doing it for fun.

I'm not really going to be doing anything productive Airbnb.

But if I was 26, I would have thought of myself as a technical person.

I think all designers should think of themselves as product people and as front-end engineers, if anything.