Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on AI's future: One person can be a billion-dollar company

Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky said the current AI boom is the fourth special period in computing history and 'bigger than the other three combined,' predicting that one-person companies could reach billion-dollar valuations. Chesky, who is using Anthropic's Claude Code to code, said the AI era is 'the most important moment in tech' and a 'seminal moment in human history.'

Listen and subscribe to Power Players with Brian Sozzi on Apple Podcasts , Amazon Music , Spotify , YouTube , or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Airbnb ABNB https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ABNB/ co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky has seen and done it all in tech, but he acknowledges that the current AI boom is perhaps more special than prior chapters. "I think there probably has been maybe four really special periods in the history of computing," Chesky said in a new episode of the Power Players with Brian Sozzi https://finance.yahoo.com/videos/series/power-players/ podcast video above . "Probably one special period was the late 70s, early 80s. That was the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates era. I think another era that was really special, and I was in middle school when this happened, was when the internet came out in the mid-90s. I think the third special era was when I started Airbnb. And that was when Facebook had just launched. The iPhone had just come out, the internet was going global, and Amazon AMZN https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN/ AWS meant you didn't need to have your own servers. And I think that was this very special window." In late 2007, design graduates and roommates Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia were struggling to pay rent on their San Francisco apartment when they noticed local hotels were fully booked for an incoming design conference. Seizing the opportunity, they placed three air mattresses on their living room floor, created a basic website called "Air Bed & Breakfast," and hosted three guests for $80 per night, including home-cooked breakfast. Alongside third co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk, Chesky turned that original necessity-driven experiment into a global hospitality empire that has since hosted more than 2 billion guest arrivals. Today, Chesky is hard at work transforming Airbnb into a super app where you can book a rental car or hotel room for a vacation. On the current moment in tech, "I think this is the fourth window, and this is bigger than the other three combined," Chesky added. "I mean, this feels like not only the most important moment in tech — I hate to be so hyperbolic — but it seems like one of those things that a thousand years from now, or at least certainly a hundred years from now, you're going to look back and say this was a very seminal moment in human history. And so it's wild." Here are two of Chesky's predictions on the future of tech from the latest episode of Power Players: Prediction 1: "It's never been easier to start a company. And I do think a one-person company could be a billion-dollar company. I think we might've already seen that. I'd never consider myself a technical founder. Today I'd be coding. In fact, I am coding in Claude Code. And so, back then, I was really inhibited. I think the agents even kind of teach you to code because you can watch them code, you can expand and see the commands, and just develop an intuition for what's possible."