The Most Important Thing to Remember When Facing A Crisis, According to the CEOs of Airbnb and DraftKings

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A problem is just a problem.

I know that doesn’t sound especially revelatory, but it felt that way the first time I heard it. This was back in 2017 when I was speaking with DraftKings CEO Jason Robins, who had recently survived an extinction-level threat to his business. A few states had been considering laws to outlaw the kind of betting that DraftKings facilitates, which would have put it out of business.

I wanted to know: How did he think through such an existential problem? How did he even wrap his head around it?

“Like anything when you're building a business, you just need to always look forward and say, ‘Alright, what do I need to do to tackle this and solve this?” he replied. “It's really no different than figuring out how to build a product that people want, or how to compete more effectively against our competitors. It was the same kind of thing. It was: This is the problem we've got to solve.”

That answer has always stuck with me, because it’s so practical and true. It’s not like problems become so big that they morph into supernatural beings. No — big or small, a problem is still just a thing that needs solving.

Ever since that conversation, I’ve loved seeing this philosophy play out in other people’s minds. And I recently caught a version of it while hearing how Airbnb navigated the early days of Covid, when 80% of its business suddenly disappeared.

How do you deal with something like that? Simple: You treat it as a problem in need of solving.

A little while ago, my friend Jordan Harbinger interviewed Airbnb cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky. It’s a great conversation — you should check it out. (I’ll admit I missed it originally, but another friend pointed me to it recently and I just listened. Thanks Irina!)

Jordan asked what Brian learned about navigating crisis, and Brian laid out a few great points.

Here they are:

Lesson 1: Be Decisive.

“I think that sounds kind of obvious when I say it,” Brian said. “You wouldn't believe the number of people who get paralyzed in a crisis, because there were a few good options and people like perfection. So what do you do when you have only three crappy choices, and you've got to pick one? If you don't pick one, now you have two crappy choices. And if you don't pick one of those, now you only are left with that one really, really crappy choice. So decisiveness is really key.”

Lesson 2: Be Principally Oriented

“I had a prior crisis where things were so bad that at one point I remember saying to myself, I don't know what the hell is going to happen,” he said. “How do I want to be remembered regardless of the outcome? I call that a principle decision, not a business decision. A business decision is, 'I'm making a rational decision to optimize a certain outcome to win.' A principle decision is, 'I can't possibly predict how this is going to end. So how do we want to be remembered?'

"To do that, I ended up writing down a series of principles: act with all stakeholders in mind, don't be a villain of this crisis, play for the long-term for this company. So you make a series of principles and those principles can govern lots of decisions. “

Lesson 3: Communicate More.

“If you're used to communicating like every week, now you've got to communicate every day,” he said. “The faster things change and the more freaked out people are, the more communication, the more assurance that you need to have. But the most important thing I learned in the crisis was that the hardest thing to manage in a crisis, to be honest, is your own psychology. When you feel like you're going to lose it all, it's really easy to say ‘Why me,’ to get really down. And the problem with that is that everyone's looking to the leader and the leader thinks they're screwed. Then everyone else thinks they're screwed. And if everyone thinks they're screwed, they kind of stop working to fix the situation.

“So you have to be optimistic — not blind optimism, but you have to be optimistic because when you're optimistic, you typically work creative. And when you're optimistic, you don't quit. You're like, I'm going to figure this out. And so to manage your own psychology is probably the hardest part of managing a crisis. It is unrelenting and it can be like staring into an abyss of despair if you aren't really strong mentally.”

Again, there’s a lot more good stuff in the episode.

You can see how both Jason of DraftKings and Brian of Airbnb think similarly: Instead of being overwhelmed by a giant problem, they broke it down into its component parts. What needs solving? How can they go about solving it? And how can they become the leader that’s necessary for this moment?

A problem is just a problem. No matter how big, ugly, scary, or complicated it is — it’s also as simple as that.

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Cover credit: Getty Images / ferrantraite