"Brian Chesky's centralized, founder-in-the-trenches model at Airbnb was a masterclass in how a single leader can carry the taste bar for a whole company — and Sanchan learned that the founder being on the front line, not delegating the product, is what separated Airbnb from the companies that went down in flames."
Evidence from the Archive
Airbnb
Brian Chesky renamed every Airbnb PM to 'Product Marketing Manager' to reassert that the founder and design organization owned taste
Sanchan Saxena scaled Airbnb's PM org from ~30 to ~200 under Chesky and learned the taste bar only survives if the founder is personally on the front line, not delegating
Sanchan joined Airbnb in 2017 and rose to head of product, working directly under Chesky through hypergrowth and COVID. His claim is that Airbnb had to be a deeply founder-driven company, and that the company's survival through COVID was only possible because Brian was literally on the front line making product calls himself.
The famous PM rename — from 'product manager' to 'product marketing manager' — was a deliberate move to strip PMs of the ambiguous 'owner of the product' claim and reassert that the founder and design org owned taste. Sanchan describes getting a 'masterclass from Chesky in how to build products' by watching him act and decide with enormous consistency.
In Sanchan's own words: "The secret sauce of that in my opinion is the founder. And if the employees do not believe in the founder, if the employees do not believe that the founder can make things happen as they talk about... those companies go down in flames. The second thing I would say is the founder needs to be at the front line. And Brian Chesky was on the front line." (On why distributed taste models fail in crisis.)