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The CEO of Disney is the most renowned CEO job in America. Wondering who will succeed Bob Iger and be just the eighth person to hold the job in the companys 102-year history has been a parlor game/obsession in Hollywood and beyond since, well, at least October 2011 (!), when Disneys board first started succession planning. Igers early successes (acquiring Pixar and Marvel, reviving Disney Animation) have made him hard to replace, and his general refusal to leave hasnt helped either. Iger will announce his successor in early 2026 (in theory!) and then step away (for real this time!) later next year, at age 75. While most speculation has centered on two to four internal candidates, theres a singular leader who should be Disneys next chief executive: Brian Chesky, Airbnbs cofounder and CEO. In this piece, premium subscribers will learn: How running Airbnb is the perfect training to lead Disney now The key relationship Chesky brings that no one else can offer Why Disney needs a tech CEO to survive the 21st Century Disney is now a hospitality and experiences company Dont get distracted by The Fantastic Four: First Steps or the Alien: Earth series. Disney may have movie studios, TV production companies, and streaming services, but it is not an entertainment company. Look to where the companys growth story is and where much of its profits are coming from. They arent from Disneys Entertainment or Sports divisions. No, theyre thanks to its Experiences division, which houses Disney theme parks, hotels, cruise ships, and merchandise. In Disneys fiscal 2024 (which ended September 30 last year), Experiences made $34.2 billion in revenue and $9.3 billion in operating income (an internal measure of segment profitability, minus some restructuring and other expenses). Its Entertainment division garnered $41.2 billion in revenue, the largest slice of its revenue pie, but just $3.9 billion in operating income. Heres the revenue breakdown in percentage form: Entertainment: 44%Experiences: 37%Sports: 19% Now consider operating income:Experiences: 60%Entertainment: 25%Sports: 15% Disneys investments in its future also signal the direction of the company. In September 2023, it committed to spend approximately $60 billion over the next decade on capital expenditures for the Experiences division, expanding parks and adding cruise ships. In May, Iger used the companys earnings call to announce that Disney had partnered with the Miral Group to build its first-ever theme park in the Middle East (he was actually in Abu Dhabi during the call). There is no comparable investment to grow the entertainment business. Thats a business of managed decline at the moment, largely driven by a failure of imagination. Disney has oversaturated the market with superhero movies and TV spinoffs, live action remakes of animated classics, as well as sequels, reboots, and reimaginings. (The forthcoming Freakier Friday being emblematic of the latter trend.) The company makes about half as many movies as it did when Iger took over, despite him acquiring the rival studio 20th Century Fox in 2017. That strategy needs a creative reset. Disneys broadcast network, ABC, will air just five hours of scripted programming this fall in primetime (which is 22 hours) and ordered just one new show. The rest of the schedule is sports, reality, and game shows. Unsurprisingly, the ostensible leading internal candidate to be the next CEO is Josh DAmaro, who runs the Experiences division. DAmaro, 54, has worked for Disneys theme parks since 1998 and been chairman of Disney Experiences since 2020. The other rumored internal candidates are the chair of ESPN, Jimmy Pitaro, and the cochairs of Disney Entertainment Dana Walden and Alan Bergman. Although DAmaro arguably runs a larger business than Cheskys Airbnb, $34.2 billion to $11.1 billion, Airbnb is the most innovative, disruptive hospitality company to emerge since, what, Holiday Inn in 1952? Also, if you were to consider Airbnbs gross booking value (the total sum consumers spend on Airbnb), that number, $81.8 billion, swells well past Disneys Experiences business. Chesky speaking at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York City, 2023. [Photo: Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images/Fast Company] Chesky is a generational talent Airbnbs cofounder and CEO, who turns 44 on August 29, is one of the most successful startup CEOs of the last two decades. Chesky has taken a kernel of an ideapeople sharing their homes for travelers in lieu of a hoteland grown it into a global behemoth thats more valuable than any other hotel company in the world. (Marriott, at about $71 billion, is the largest traditional hotel chain.) Hes done this in the face of extreme doubters, existential crises, local regulatory fights, and more. Chesky is a designer by training. Hes capable, as he puts it, of seeing the world through the eyes of a child. He believes in spending as much time in the field as in the lab, routinely experiencing Airbnbs offering as both a host (having people in his own San Francisco home) and as a guest, traveling the world. As a Y Combinator graduate (winter 2009 batch), hes guided by the deceptively simple precept make something people love. Think about someone with that mindset and approach running Disney. Chesky is a showman, exactly what Disney needs The CEO of Disney not only has to run the company but be the public face of the brand, the emissary for millions of fans. Former CEO Michael Eisner (19842005) hosted Disneys iconic Sunday night ABC TV showcase. Iger is a fixture at premieres and theme park openings, exuding the kind of easy charisma that had some people thinking he could run for president. Lacking this ability is fatal in the role. Look no further than Bob Chapek, who replaced Iger as CEO in February 2020 until he was fired in November 2022 and Iger returned. Chapek skipped the Disney fan event, D23, in 2021 for fear of being booed and then was booed by some fans in 2022, even amid his effort to soften his chilly image by growing a beard. Chesky is well suited to this public-facig part of the job, with his boundless energy and penchant for grand gestures. He has shifted Airbnbs product releases into winter and summer reveals designed to garner more attention than most companies usual drip-drip-drip of product updates. Airbnb has also found a clever marketing hack with iconic, often movie-related home experiences from Barbies Malibu Dream House to re-creations the balloon house in Up and Rileys internal control center in Inside Out 2. Chesky with a replica of the house from Disney’s 2009 film Up, 2024. [Photo: Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Airbnb] But more than being the companys chief evangelist, to thrive as Disney CEO, you have to be in founder mode, treating the company as your own. In September 2024, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, who admitted Airbnb into the startup accelerator, lauded a Chesky talk about how, as Graham put it, conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. Shifting into being a manager rather than retaining some aspect of how you ran your company as a startup is a trap that damaged rather than helped company leaders. Chesky has described founder mode as being willing to be in the details, pushing people to think bigger, and having a direct connection to the leaders in charge of every part of the company. Although the current Experiences chief, DAmaro, has some fans among theme park obsessives, all the internal candidates feel more like management suits rather than founder showmen. How Disney thinking built Airbnb I got this text message from Brian one night. It said, Snow White. Ill tell you later. So begins the video above, an introduction to how Chesky and Airbnb redesigned its entire end-to-end customer experience in 2012, inspired by how Walt Disney himself created the first animated feature film. I realized that Disney as a company was actually at a similar stage where we are now when they created Snow White, Chesky told Fast Company at the time, relaying how a Disney biography proved foundational in how he thought about the companys next chapter. As we wrote: [Disney] had success with shorter cartoons, but Walt wanted to create a feature-length film with enough depth that people would care about, not just laugh at, the characters. He wanted to tell a complete story. Airbnbs process included hiring a Pixar animator to storyboard the new customer experience, conveying the emotion they wanted guests to feel. He would go on to hire Bruce Vaughn, former head of Disney Imagineering and the person who led the redesign of California Adventure and helped develop Star Wars Land, to work on the design of Airbnbs real-world experience. In the last several years, almost every longform interview Chesky has given features references to Disney. (Apple is the only other company Chesky mentions besides his own.) I convinced my dad to buy some Disney stock, he told Amy Devers on the Clever podcast in 2020, recalling an early experience with the Walt Disney Company as a teenager. We couldnt buy a lot, but if you became a shareholder at Disney you could get this thing called the Annual Report and the Annual Reports, they used to be these beautiful magazines, with these paintings of theme parks. And I became obsessive about kind of reimagine [sic] the design of theme parks. Walt Disney’s 1957 ‘flywheel’ graphic. [Image: Disney] There have been Disney-obsessed techies before, of course. The famed 1957 Disney flywheel graphic is oft-cited in tech circles. Jason Kilar, who went from Amazon exec to Hulu CEO and then Warner Bros. chief, was also obsessed with Disney, but he rubbed some Hollywood people the wrong way with his brash style, particularly his 2020 decision to put all of WBs theatrical movies onto the Max streaming service at the same time for a year. That decision still looms large in Hollywood, so another tech leader taking over a studio (that, again, is much more a travel experiences company today) would likely be met with significant resistance in the highly insular entertainment business. But . . . Disney desperately needs to figure out a real tech future For as many things that Disney has arguably done well in the last 30 years, developing a coherent, sustainable digital strategy is not among them. Eisner bought a big stake in third-rate search engine Infoseek in 1998 and then doubled down on that strategy a year later in creating the ill-fated Go.com to compete as userss starting point on the internet. Igers tenure has had one successful tech acquisition (paying about $2.5 billion to control BAMTech, the infrastructure to power its streaming services) and one opportunistic deal in 20056 to be the first to sell movies and shows on AppleiTunes. But Igers reign also been marked by several disappointing and/or disastrous big-ticket digital acquisitions and investments: Disney acquired the massive multiplayer online game Club Penguin in 2007 for $350 million. The growth of the childrens game failed to meet early goals, its popularity waned, and it shuttered in 2017. It acquired the social gaming company Playdom in 2010 for at least $563.2 million, was doing layoffs within six months, and shut the whole thing down in 2016. In 2014, it spent $500 million to buy the popular YouTube network of channels, Maker Studios, a poor fit within Disney, which quickly lost its appetite to create original shows for the video streaming giant. In 2015, it put $400 million into the then high-flying Vice Media; it wrote that investment down to zero in 2019. Along the way in the mid-2010s, as Iger was initially preparing to leave the first time, he considered buying Snap, Spotify, and Twitter, any of which would have given Disney the kind of modern digital distribution platform it still desperately needs. But its track record of managing consumer internet acquisitions doesnt present a compelling Sliding Doorsstyle scenario for any of those apps. Meanwhile, Chesky is Silicon Valley royalty By contrast, Chesky started and built a tech platform with an approximately $80 billion market cap. Hes also a leading member of the Y Combinator mafia. When fellow YC alum Sam Altman was removed as CEO of OpenAIthe most important tech company of the last decadeChesky played a key role rallying support for Altman during those few days. As a YC board member, Chesky has an early look at some of the most impressive young founders, their companies, and the tech trends they represent. A connected player like Chesky gives Disney its best possible chance to compete with Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube and maybe even surpass them by finding the next big thing early before anyone else and then nurture rather than stymie it. The cockroach Disney needs Hollywood currently faces a cataclysmic series of challenges, AI chief among them. Worse, the leadership of entertainment companies seem largely powerless and/or disinterested in doing anything about saving Hollywood from being further diminished in the broader popular culture. What it needs in this moment is a cockroach, in Y Combinator parlance. Meaning, it needs someone who is effectively unkillable and refuses to let their company die, someone built to survive events that would kill lesser leaders. Someone like Chesky, whom YC founder Paul Graham complimented as one of these cockroaches. COVID should have killed Airbnb. Lord knows a lot of people thought it was a goner in March 2020 when Chesky saw 80% of his business evaporate seemingly overnight. But Chesky would not let that happen to Airbnb, and after a series of rapid moves, he not only stabilized the company but pulled off a successful IPO in December 2020. Hes told the story innumerable times, and if you want to hear it, check out this particularly good version of the tale: Many people are convinced that Apple should, and perhaps will, buy Disney. But if Disney is to survive and thrive as an independent company, then it needs a young, tireless cockroach to bring it into the 21st Century. It needs Brian Chesky.
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E-Commerce
The daily standup is perhaps the most recognizable ceremony observed by modern teams. Maybe thats part of the problem. People know theyre supposed to be holding standups, but they don’t remember why. When the reasons behind daily standups get lost, they become status updates. Instead of opportunities to keep everyone aligned behind the constant progress that should be happening, these daily meetings become platforms for people to justify their paychecks to their bosses. Its a daily version of government employees emailing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to advocate for their continued employment. Funnily enough, the people who do the least feel compelled to talk the most. The least productive people spend more time thinking about what theyll say in front of their peers and boss than they do contributing to outcomes that matter. Come to think of it, this has been the case every single time Ive found myself in a standup that wasnt quite working. Theres always been someone who talks and talks, but still leaves the rest of us wondering what they actually accomplished. The next thing you know, you have long meetings that dont focus on real progress. Its easier for the boss to micromanage everyone, and harder for individuals to spend time doing what theyre paid to do. If any or all of this sounds familiar, you have three ways out of the daily standup rut. 1. Mix It Up People get the idea that daily standups have to be in the morning, but thats not the case. You might be surprised by how much simply changing the time of your meeting can change the outcome. If your people start the workday fresh and fired up, let them put that energy into their work instead of making them wait around for a meeting to start. Holding the standup around noon can help break the day into parts, which helps some teams. Other teams might benefit more from holding the standup at the end of the day, like having a recap and setting an intention for the next day. As an added benefit, its easier to remember whats worth mentioning in the Monday standup when you dont have to think back to what you did all day on Friday before the weekend. If youre unsure of when to schedule the standups, you can always ask the team about their preferences. Which parts of the day are they most prepared to do great work? Schedule the standup for some other time to protect those most productive hours. 2. Focus on Outcomes, Not Activities Traditional daily standups revolve around three questions: What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? Whats in your way? If these questions arent being answered in your standups, its time to reinvigorate the habit. But theres no need to get stuck on tradition or dogma, especially because it sometimes puts your focus on the wrong thing. You can probably think of questions that are more important and more relevant to your team. You should already have a tracker where all of your work is visible, whether on a traditional corkboard or in Jira or Airtable. Instead of going person by person, try gathering around the tracker and going item by item. Now youre focused on advancing the work instead of assessing individual performance. Its not about who got the most done between Mary versus Taylor versus Steve anymore. It’s about tracking the progress Mary, Taylor, and Steve are making against shared problems and goals. 3. Stop Going The very best way to stop your standups from being upward status reports is to remove power differentials from the room. Its impossible to show off for the boss when the boss isnt there. The least satisfactory standups Ive seen as a leader have been when Im in there with my management team trying to run the show and keep things on track. The times when Im most satisfied are the times when Im just peeking in to see whats going on. But the best standups I ever joined as a manager were the ones where I kept my mouth shut. And the standups I didnt join were probably even better. Even if youre sitting in the back and being quiet, people know youre there, and the observer effect comes into play. Productive teams deserve, and even need, autonomy. Saving the standup If you think about why youre having standups, the ways to make them better might become obvious. This isnt about reporting progress upwardsave that for the demo at the end of the sprint. Its about making sure everyone is aligned on whats changing and what needs to happen next. Mix up the time. Then change the format to return the focus to the items youre working on and the outcomes youre after. Make sure theres no audience for performative displays. Everything else will fall into place.
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E-Commerce
Modern television doesnt have much more of a sure thing than Season 2 of the hit Netflix show Wednesday. The new season comes almost three years after the shows initial 2022 debut, which garnered 350 million views and holds the record as the streamers most popular English-language show ever. These levels of scale and pop cultural pull make Wednesday a marketing dream. So far, its been Netflixs largest prelaunch social campaign ever, with more than 3 billion owned social impressions. I spoke to Netflix CMO Marian Lee about the streamer’s investment in outdoor advertising, how the team chooses its limited number of brand partnerships, and the strategies it uses to evolve the campaign in real time. [Photo: Jonathan Hession/Netflix 2025] Big Outcast Energy Last March, Lee told me that every campaign for a Netflix property has to begin by establishing a clear overall creative strategy and point of view, which then provides a lens or filter through which the marketing teams in countries around the world can determine the best way to express it in their markets. For Wednesday Season 2, that perspective was what Lee calls Big outcast energy. #WEDNESDAY Season 2 billboards spotted all across LA.PART1: Aug 6th and PART2: Sep 3rd only on Netflix. pic.twitter.com/hUMPrclBOQ— Jenna Ortega Updates (@JennaOrtegaUpds) July 22, 2025 There is so much fan connection with Wednesday being an outcast that the creative platform almost writes itself, Lee says. Everything was through the lens of this girl who is a doom-and-gloom outcast. Everyone has a little bit of that inside of them, and so there is that emotional connection. So for Season 2, we did a lot more around this big outcast energy and playing off of Wednesday and Enid, in particular. When you have a character like Wednesday, it really brings a lot to the table for us to work with. The brand has leaned into outdoor ads in a big way, using billboards and bus benches to juxtapose Wednesdays doom and gloom with Enids bright and shiny vibe. @wednesdaynetflix trying not to take it personally that enid called *Wednesday* her bestie… original sound – ThingTok – Wednesday Netflix One of Lees favorite pieces of work is when Wednesday and Enid go full meta about advertising the show itself. Jenna Ortegas Wednesday is bemoaning the obligation, while Emma Myerss Enid is fully bought in. It’s just perfect, Lee says. Of course, Wednesday would hate making promotional material. Its just a cute self-awareness that I love. Picking brand partners Brand partners have been scrambling to work with Netflix since before Stranger Things chugged New Coke back in 2019. Squid Game rolled out collabs with Kia, Duolingo, and Crocs earlier this year. And Wednesday is no exception. Wendys has collaborated on an entire Wednesday-curated Meal of Misfortune that includes two of four inferno-inspired mystery sauces called “Dips of Dread,” along with “Rest in 10-Piece” nuggets, “Cursed & Crispy” fries, and a “Raven’s Blood” Frosty, all served in custom packaging. Netflix has teamed with Booking.com for a campaign that will invite travelers to discover the world through the eyes of Catherine Zeta-Joness Morticia Addams. And for Cheetos, the focus is on the shows mischievous severed-hand character, Thing. The brands new spokeshand makes the tie-in to orange-dusted fingertips obvious and inspired. The approach we take with all partnerships is that we set the creative bar really high, Lee says. We want to work with partners who can appreciate the IP and appreciate that our bar for creative work that we’re going to put out in the world utilizing our IP isn’t just going to be a logo slap. The companys international brand partnerships for the show include Spanish insurance company Línea Directa Aseguradora, Brazilian soda Guaraná, Cheetos in Mexico, and So Paulo, Brazi-based Nubank. Netflix would not comment on specific marketing budget and revenue numbers. The company’s 2024 earnings report showed an overall sales and marketing spend of $2.9 billion. According to data firm Parrot Analytics, Wednesday made $360 million in advertising and subscription revenue for Netflix between its November 2022 release and March of this year. [Brands] have their own goals, and we have our own goals, and so when we set out to have a partnership, overall we’re really thinking about what would fit here, Lee says. And not everything will work, right? So we tend to bring big creative ideas to partners that we know share that same sensibility and are willing to go out with us and ideate on something. [Photo: Bernard Walsh/Netflix 2024] Led by fandom When Lee started at Netflix four years ago, the company was in the midst of shooting the first season of Wednesday in Romania. The marketing team told her that the show was going to be a hit. Like, a really big hit. But even then, the scale of the fan response surprised everyone. We knew it would be big and we had planned for it, but not for how deep the fandom went, how they were going to dress, how they were going to do their makeup, how they were going to look, how it almost normalized anyone who’s never fit in, Lee says. And we rode off of a lot of the fan momentum. That included partnering with Lady Gaga after a fan cut together a dance scene from the show with the artists song Bloody Mary. It sparked a tremendous 1,800% spike in the songs Spotify streams, and led to Gaga shooting a Wednesday-inspired video herself. @ladygaga BLOODY WEDNESDAY #fyp original sound – Paul Lee says that in all of its marketing, Netflix tries to plan for the unexpected to react to how fans are embracing and engaging with its shows. For Season 2 of Wednesday, Lady Gaga is reportedly dropping a new song called Dead Dance that will make an appearance in the show. The marketing team for the new season is the same as it was for the original, so Lee says there is a built-in expertise on the IP and how fans are engaging with it. That requires constant, real-time monitoring of what fans are up to across all platforms, particularly Reddit, Instagram, and TikTok. This gives the marketing team invaluable feedback on everything from brand partnerships to billboard copy. They’re really vocal, Lee says, because they have such heart and love for these characters.
Category:
E-Commerce
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