No one shamed Airbnb's chief for working 18-hour days in COVID

During COVID, Brian Chesky, Airbnb's chief executive and co-founder, put in 18-hour days while a global lockdown settled over a hospitality business built on guests staying in strangers' homes.

An 18-hour day leaves only a few hours for sleep, meals, and everything else, and a lockdown meant travel was limited and strangers were keeping apart. A company whose product needed movement and closeness, sleeping in someone else's spare room or apartment, was trying to keep going when both were shut down.

No one shamed Chesky for keeping that schedule, and Airbnb came out of the lockdown stronger than it went in. The writer who recounts it, a startup investor writing a personal newsletter, finds that lack of criticism notable. In his view, the greats rarely get shamed for long hours.

In his account, most people leave that type alone apart from saying they can be difficult to work with.

The explanation he offers is one he says he is beginning to hold. He describes such leaders as "unapologetic in their pursuit of their own potential," his phrase for refusing to apologize for chasing what they might be capable of.

He puts the larger point as something you could argue. If someone is working on something big enough, looking after the health of the whole business and what it makes possible for others may matter more than worrying about seeming likable as an individual. By the larger thing, he means the company itself and its effects, and by the smaller thing, he means one person's reputation.

Whether the long hours caused the rebound is not shown. He writes as someone surprised by the outcome, asking who would have thought that kind of business could go through that kind of shutdown. Chesky, in this account, simply kept working.