It seems like a no-brainer that companies should hire the very best people, but the costs of hiring people who aren’t the best is a lot more than one would expect.
Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, is quite vocal about his philosophy on lean, high-performing teams as the company navigates post-pandemic growth and efficiency pressures. In a discussion, Chesky outlined a counterintuitive perspective on hiring that challenges conventional wisdom about team building and organizational growth. His insights reveal how mediocre hiring decisions create cascading effects that go far beyond individual performance metrics.
“We want a small, lean, elite, highly skilled team, not a team of kind of mid-level battalion type people,” Chesky explained. “And the reason why is every person brings with them a communication tax. The reason there’s too many meetings in a company isn’t because they don’t have meeting-free Wednesdays. It’s because they have too many people.”
According to Chesky, the relationship between headcount and organizational complexity isn’t linear—it’s exponential. “People create meetings, and the best way to get rid of meetings is to not have so many people. There’s no other better way to do that,” he emphasized. This perspective reframes the common complaint about excessive meetings from a scheduling problem to a fundamental structural issue.
The Airbnb CEO then addressed what he sees as a particularly insidious hiring pattern: “Non-world-class people… You know what the old saying? A players hire A players, B players hire C players. I would like to amend it: B players hire lots of C players. Not just a few, but a lot, because those are the kind of people that like building empires, but they’re also the people—if you can’t do your job, you don’t hire people better than you, and a person less capable can’t do the job. So you need three incapable people because one incapable person can’t actually do all the work.”
Chesky’s amendment to the classic hiring axiom reveals a multiplication effect that many leaders overlook. “But now three incapable people are just going in three different directions, creating all these meetings and all this administrative tax,” he continued. His solution was decisive: “So we removed the layers of management. I got rid of layers of management.”
Chesky’s philosophy reflects a broader trend among tech leaders toward organizational efficiency and talent density. Companies like Netflix have long championed similar approaches with their “keeper test” culture, while others like Meta and Twitter have undergone significant layoffs to achieve leaner structures. The emphasis on elite, small teams mirrors practices at companies like Apple under Steve Jobs, who famously believed that small teams of exceptional people could outperform much larger groups of average performers. As economic pressures mount and growth becomes more challenging, Chesky’s perspective suggests that the hidden costs of mediocre hiring—from communication overhead to administrative burden—may be one of the most overlooked factors in organizational performance. The true expense isn’t just a mediocre employee’s salary, but the exponential drag they create on the entire system’s velocity and focus.