Airbnb’s Spin Master
Despite a combative reputation, former political operative Chris Lehane has emerged as the travel rental firm’s most influential executive next to CEO Brian Chesky. Now the public affairs chief is facing his toughest test yet: helping the company survive a devastating pandemic and pull off a successful IPO.
Chris Lehane was piping mad. Laurence Tosi, Airbnb’s chief financial officer, had accused the Airbnb policy and communications chief of spending millions of dollars before Tosi had signed off on the plans, approval Lehane didn’t think he needed.
Their dispute flared up near the parking lot behind Airbnb’s headquarters one morning in 2017. Co-workers witnessed Lehane yelling and cursing at Tosi before storming past the CFO. The episode, described by multiple people familiar with it, became lore inside parts of Airbnb. Some staffers who witnessed it walked back to the office shaken, one of the people said. “Oh, the famous parking lot thing,” a current high-level employee described it.
It wasn’t the first time Lehane had clashed with a colleague. He frequently battled others in the upper ranks of Airbnb over financial and strategic questions, though the arguments weren’t usually so heated. More often than not, current and former co-workers said, he won those fights, through both deft handling of internal politics and a keen outsider’s sense of how the startup was perceived far from its San Francisco home base. His ability to anticipate and manage public relations crises, aided by his years of experience as a political operative, has won him the respect of Airbnb’s CEO, Brian Chesky, who increasingly has come to rely on the 53-year-old executive in planning for the company’s future.