The CEO of Disney is essentially the most famend CEO job in America. Questioning who will succeed Bob Iger and be simply the eighth particular person to carry the job within the firm’s 102-year historical past has been a parlor recreation/obsession in Hollywood and past since, effectively, at the least October 2011 (!), when Disney’s board first began succession planning. Iger’s early successes (buying Pixar and Marvel, reviving Disney Animation) have made him arduous to exchange, and his normal refusal to go away hasn’t helped both.
Iger will announce his successor in early 2026 (in principle!) after which step away (for actual this time!) later subsequent yr, at age 75. Whereas most hypothesis has centered on two to 4 inner candidates, there’s a singular chief who ought to be Disney’s subsequent chief govt: Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s cofounder and CEO.
On this piece, premium subscribers will study:
- How working Airbnb is the right coaching to guide Disney now
- The important thing relationship Chesky brings that nobody else can provide
- Why Disney wants a tech CEO to outlive the twenty first Century
Disney is now a hospitality and experiences firm
Don’t get distracted by The Improbable 4: First Steps or the Alien: Earth collection. Disney might have film studios, TV manufacturing corporations, and streaming companies, however it’s not an leisure firm.
Look to the place the corporate’s development story is and the place a lot of its income are coming from. They aren’t from Disney’s Leisure or Sports activities divisions.
No, they’re because of its Experiences division, which homes Disney theme parks, inns, cruise ships, and merchandise.
In Disney’s fiscal 2024 (which ended September 30 final yr), Experiences made $34.2 billion in income and $9.3 billion in working earnings (an inner measure of section profitability, minus some restructuring and different bills). Its Leisure division garnered $41.2 billion in income, the biggest slice of its income pie, however simply $3.9 billion in working earnings.
Right here’s the income breakdown in proportion kind:
Leisure: 44%
Experiences: 37%
Sports activities: 19%
Now take into account working earnings:
Experiences: 60%
Leisure: 25%
Sports activities: 15%
Disney’s investments in its future additionally sign the route of the corporate. In September 2023, it dedicated to spend roughly $60 billion over the following decade on capital expenditures for the Experiences division, increasing parks and including cruise ships. In Might, Iger used the corporate’s earnings name to announce that Disney had partnered with the Miral Group to construct its first-ever theme park within the Center East (he was really in Abu Dhabi through the name).
There is no such thing as a comparable funding to develop the leisure enterprise. That’s a enterprise of managed decline for the time being, largely pushed by a failure of creativeness. Disney has oversaturated the market with superhero films and TV spinoffs, dwell motion remakes of animated classics, in addition to sequels, reboots, and “reimaginings.” (The forthcoming Freakier Friday being emblematic of the latter pattern.) The corporate makes about half as many films because it did when Iger took over, regardless of him buying the rival studio twentieth Century Fox in 2017.
That technique wants a artistic reset.
Disney’s broadcast community, ABC, will air simply 5 hours of scripted programming this fall in primetime (which is 22 hours) and ordered only one new present. The remainder of the schedule is sports activities, actuality, and recreation exhibits.
Unsurprisingly, the ostensible main inner candidate to be the following CEO is Josh D’Amaro, who runs the Experiences division. D’Amaro, 54, has labored for Disney’s theme parks since 1998 and been chairman of Disney Experiences since 2020. The opposite rumored inner candidates are the chair of ESPN, Jimmy Pitaro, and the cochairs of Disney Leisure Dana Walden and Alan Bergman.
Though D’Amaro arguably runs a bigger enterprise than Chesky’s Airbnb, $34.2 billion to $11.1 billion, Airbnb is essentially the most revolutionary, disruptive hospitality firm to emerge since, what, Vacation Inn in 1952? Additionally, for those who had been to contemplate Airbnb’s gross reserving worth (the whole sum shoppers spend on Airbnb), that quantity, $81.8 billion, swells effectively previous Disney’s Experiences enterprise.
Chesky talking on the Quick Firm Innovation Pageant in New York Metropolis, 2023. [Photo: Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images/Fast Company]
Chesky is a generational expertise
Airbnb’s cofounder and CEO, who turns 44 on August 29, is likely one of the most profitable startup CEOs of the final 20 years. Chesky has taken a kernel of an concept—folks sharing their houses for vacationers in lieu of a lodge—and grown it into a worldwide behemoth that’s extra worthwhile than every other lodge firm on the earth. (Marriott, at about $71 billion, is the biggest conventional lodge chain.) He’s finished this within the face of maximum doubters, existential crises, native regulatory fights, and extra.
Chesky is a designer by coaching. He’s succesful, as he places it, of “seeing the world by way of the eyes of a kid.” He believes in spending as a lot time within the area as within the lab, routinely experiencing Airbnb’s providing as each a bunch (having folks in his personal San Francisco residence) and as a visitor, touring the world.
As a Y Combinator graduate (winter 2009 batch), he’s guided by the deceptively easy principle “make one thing folks love.”
Take into consideration somebody with that mindset and strategy working Disney.
Chesky is a showman, precisely what Disney wants
The CEO of Disney not solely has to run the corporate however be the general public face of the model, the emissary for hundreds of thousands of followers. Former CEO Michael Eisner (1984–2005) hosted Disney’s iconic Sunday night time ABC TV showcase. Iger is a fixture at premieres and theme park openings, exuding the sort of straightforward charisma that had some folks pondering he may run for president.
Missing this potential is deadly within the function. Look no additional than Bob Chapek, who changed Iger as CEO in February 2020 till he was fired in November 2022 and Iger returned. Chapek skipped the Disney fan occasion, D23, in 2021 for worry of being booed after which was booed by some followers in 2022, even amid his effort to melt his chilly picture by rising a beard.
Chesky is effectively suited to this public-facing a part of the job, along with his boundless power and penchant for grand gestures.
He has shifted Airbnb’s product releases into winter and summer season reveals designed to garner extra consideration than most corporations’ typical drip-drip-drip of product updates. Airbnb has additionally discovered a intelligent advertising hack with iconic, usually movie-related residence experiences from Barbie’s Malibu Dream Home to re-creations the balloon home in Up and Riley’s inner management heart in Inside Out 2.
Chesky with a reproduction of the home from Disney’s 2009 movie Up, 2024. [Photo: Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Airbnb]
However greater than being the corporate’s chief evangelist, to thrive as Disney CEO, you must be in “founder mode,” treating the corporate as your personal. In September 2024, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, who admitted Airbnb into the startup accelerator, lauded a Chesky speak about how, as Graham put it, “standard knowledge about tips on how to run bigger corporations is mistaken.” Shifting into being a supervisor slightly than retaining some side of the way you ran your organization as a startup is a lure that broken slightly than helped firm leaders.
Chesky has described founder mode as being prepared to be within the particulars, pushing folks to assume larger, and having a direct connection to the leaders accountable for each a part of the corporate.
Though the present Experiences chief, D’Amaro, has some followers amongst theme park obsessives, all the inner candidates really feel extra like administration fits slightly than founder showmen.
How Disney pondering constructed Airbnb
“I received this textual content message from Brian one night time. It stated, ‘Snow White.’ I’ll inform you later.”
So begins the video above, an introduction to how Chesky and Airbnb redesigned its total end-to-end buyer expertise in 2012, impressed by how Walt Disney himself created the primary animated characteristic movie. “I spotted that Disney as an organization was really at an identical stage the place we are actually once they created Snow White,” Chesky advised Quick Firm on the time, relaying how a Disney biography proved foundational in how he thought concerning the firm’s subsequent chapter.
As we wrote: “[Disney] had success with shorter cartoons, however Walt needed to create a feature-length movie with sufficient depth that folks would care about, not simply chuckle at, the characters. He needed to inform an entire story.”
Airbnb’s course of included hiring a Pixar animator to storyboard the brand new buyer expertise, conveying the emotion they needed friends to really feel.
He would go on to rent Bruce Vaughn, former head of Disney Imagineering and the one that led the redesign of California Journey and helped develop Star Wars Land, to work on the design of Airbnb’s real-world expertise.
Within the final a number of years, virtually each longform interview Chesky has given options references to Disney. (Apple is the one different firm Chesky mentions in addition to his personal.) “I satisfied my dad to purchase some Disney inventory,” he advised Amy Devers on the Intelligent podcast in 2020, recalling an early expertise with the Walt Disney Firm as an adolescent. “We couldn’t purchase so much, however for those who turned a shareholder at Disney you possibly can get this factor known as the Annual Report and the Annual Reviews, they was these stunning magazines, with these work of theme parks. And I turned obsessive about sort of reimagine [sic] the design of theme parks.”
Walt Disney’s 1957 ‘flywheel’ graphic. [Image: Disney]
There have been Disney-obsessed techies earlier than, after all. The famed 1957 Disney flywheel graphic is oft-cited in tech circles. Jason Kilar, who went from Amazon exec to Hulu CEO after which Warner Bros. chief, was additionally obsessive about Disney, however he rubbed some Hollywood folks the fallacious approach along with his brash type, notably his 2020 choice to place all of WB’s theatrical films onto the Max streaming service on the similar time for a yr.
That call nonetheless looms massive in Hollywood, so one other tech chief taking up a studio (that, once more, is far more a journey experiences firm immediately) would probably be met with vital resistance within the extremely insular leisure enterprise. However . . .
Disney desperately wants to determine an actual tech future
For as many issues that Disney has arguably finished effectively within the final 30 years, creating a coherent, sustainable digital technique is just not amongst them. Eisner purchased a giant stake in third-rate search engine Infoseek in 1998 after which doubled down on that technique a yr later in creating the ill-fated Go.com to compete as customers’s start line on the web.
Iger’s tenure has had one profitable tech acquisition (paying about $2.5 billion to manage BAMTech, the infrastructure to energy its streaming companies) and one opportunistic deal in 2005–6 to be the primary to promote films and exhibits on Apple iTunes.
However Iger’s reign additionally been marked by a number of disappointing and/or disastrous big-ticket digital acquisitions and investments:
- Disney acquired the huge multiplayer on-line recreation Membership Penguin in 2007 for $350 million. The expansion of the kids’s recreation failed to fulfill early objectives, its recognition waned, and it shuttered in 2017.
- It acquired the social gaming firm Playdom in 2010 for at the least $563.2 million, was doing layoffs inside six months, and shut the entire thing down in 2016.
- In 2014, it spent $500 million to purchase the favored YouTube community of channels, Maker Studios, a poor match inside Disney, which shortly misplaced its urge for food to create authentic exhibits for the video streaming big.
- In 2015, it put $400 million into the then high-flying Vice Media; it wrote that funding right down to zero in 2019.
Alongside the best way within the mid-2010s, as Iger was initially making ready to go away the primary time, he thought-about shopping for Snap, Spotify, and Twitter, any of which might have given Disney the sort of trendy digital distribution platform it nonetheless desperately wants.
However its monitor file of managing client web acquisitions doesn’t current a compelling Sliding Doorways–type state of affairs for any of these apps.
In the meantime, Chesky is Silicon Valley royalty
In contrast, Chesky began and constructed a tech platform with an roughly $80 billion market cap. He’s additionally a number one member of the Y Combinator mafia.
When fellow YC alum Sam Altman was eliminated as CEO of OpenAI—an important tech firm of the final decade—Chesky performed a key function rallying help for Altman throughout these few days.
As a YC board member, Chesky has an early have a look at a number of the most spectacular younger founders, their corporations, and the tech tendencies they symbolize. A linked participant like Chesky offers Disney its very best probability to compete with Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube and perhaps even surpass them by discovering the following huge factor early earlier than anybody else after which nurture slightly than stymie it.
The ‘cockroach’ Disney wants
Hollywood presently faces a cataclysmic collection of challenges, AI chief amongst them. Worse, the management of leisure corporations appear largely powerless and/or disinterested in doing something about saving Hollywood from being additional diminished within the broader standard tradition.
What it wants on this second is a “cockroach,” in Y Combinator parlance. Which means, it wants somebody who’s successfully unkillable and refuses to let their firm die, somebody constructed to outlive occasions that will kill lesser leaders.
Somebody like Chesky, whom YC founder Paul Graham complimented as considered one of these cockroaches.
COVID ought to have killed Airbnb. Lord is aware of lots of people thought it was a goner in March 2020 when Chesky noticed 80% of his enterprise evaporate seemingly in a single day.
However Chesky wouldn’t let that occur to Airbnb, and after a collection of speedy strikes, he not solely stabilized the corporate however pulled off a profitable IPO in December 2020. He’s advised the story innumerable occasions, and if you wish to hear it, try this notably good model of the story:
Many individuals are satisfied that Apple ought to, and maybe will, purchase Disney. But when Disney is to outlive and thrive as an unbiased firm, then it wants a younger, tireless cockroach to carry it into the twenty first Century. It wants Brian Chesky.
